Cloud is a nice, nebulous term. I would count the people who really know what it means to be less than one hundred in all the world.
I'm guessing from your post and its related link that you're not one of those.
The cloud is a symbolic abstraction that separates the served from the servers in the same way that client/server architecture does, except that it adds an additional layer of abstraction for "server" that allows for servers to be hosted anywhere redundantly and transparently. It assumes a number of things, including ubiquitous networking, failover from geographically disparate servers, and the persistent reliability of service providers. That last can be avoided by designing the architecture yourself and becoming your own service provider.
Now I'm going to cover the idea of command and control. The cloud becomes a useful element of your command and control iff (if and only if) you own all of the disparate parts of it. Any other answer adds a lack of control to your architechture you cannot control if you must persist for longer than the solitary existence of your service provider.
This doesn't eliminate the cloud's utility - it just limits its scope. It's a grand idea and you should use it to the extent that you maintain control of your own cloud. To do anything else is not responsible. You must design your cloud so that the servers are owned by you and the connection service is provided by redundant providers. That's what botnet spammers do and you owe your customers no less.
I'm going to question the utility of that. A judge can learn. A juror can learn. You cannot drag up the average judge and jury and you should not hope for that. It's neither a judge nor juror's job to understand technology, nor should it be. It's the job of experts to make the utility of technology available to the common man, without the need to understand its underlying complexity. It's no more beneficial to the common person to teach him the principles of network architecture than to teach him to be a medical diagnostician or to teach him to be expert in the nuances of bankruptcy law. Noone can become expert in everything -- that's why we have experts. The job of the experts is to make the underlying complexity possible to use by designing a useful simplified interface to it. Because you bridge the gap because of your practice specialty makes you special squared and your job doubly hard. You've done well, but like me you're old and your ability to internalize new concepts is limited. It would be nice if you found a nice young tech/legal person to be your apprentice.
Getting pre-educated judges and juries is wishful thinking. I think the utility is in educating the good lawyers and hoping they don't turn to the dark side, which is bordering on fatal optimism, I know, but it's preferable to getting the knowledgable to earn law degrees and begin practice of law - that would be like pissing in the font of wisdom. You've made great strides in getting educated and I owe you a due debt both for your achievements and for much amusement in the process.
I respect and admire you. You have given me, and everybody, much benefit both in your successes and your failures. Yet I would caution you. I would prefer that you continue to be successful in your path, and so I would caution you to avoid an excess of zeal. Though your limited constituency here in geekland holds you up high, you have not and will not earn the respect of the common man. You must not let our enthusiasm lead you to believe you have the support of everyone everywhere. That road leads to Jack Thompson's fate. You can be more moderate and modest and careful in your public expressions, and in my estimate you must if you are to continue to do well. Let us who rant and rave anonymously, like me and twitter, beat your drum for you in the most extreme cases. You need not make your case more dramatic than it is -- you are the very voice of reason against the tyranny of monopoly and madness of submission to it.
And forgive me for advocating the end of copyright and patents. Although I know you don't support it, you must agree that it would end your struggle to defend people against the evil **AA monopolies. It would also put a lot of lawyers out of work. I like you, but most of us would consider that last a good thing. Yes, in the short term there would be social costs, and in the long term it would need to be reinstated again with careful limits. Still, I see no real cure but to kill the whole tree, root and branch - and start afresh with our current understanding of the risks.
Trapped in the amber of Entropy, existing in the continuum of usefulness between infinitely close but unreachable alternative choices more and less useful which define the code utility metaverse.
a photodetector that can produce multiple levels of output
I had wondered how long it would take for this to be investigated. I thought it would be a while yet, as there's still a lot of dark fiber out there. Thanks for the update. As we move back and forth between analog and binary quanta it amazes me how swiftly entire fields switch, seemingly overnight, from the one to the other and back again. I suppose one day we'll be communicating with real quanta and we'll be stuck in binary for a while with single photon emitter/detector pairs. And then someone will figure out that time is analog and we'll multiply the bandwidth again with time domain encoding.
By comparison, you probably know better than me about how LZW and DEFLATE have been superseded. (Which is also hugely interesting in the delay-state-bandwidth-energy computing relationship).
Of course, it was a long time ago. I haven't seen an RLL drive for 20 years. LZW has lost the crown on compression size but as a lightweight algorithm it does still have some appeal, and the fact that the patents have expired makes it more interesting. You are quite correct that LZW is an important lesson in both programming and information theory. I feel implementing it from the original ACM papers would be a useful lesson for both math majors and comp-sci majors. Definitely worth a few days of a 300 level class.
An element of painful truth is what makes us laugh. The RIAA story has it.
So he may not be much of a technology expert, but he's a good strong arm man.
I think he is expert. His skills might not be current, but some of his answers seem to rely on an expected lack of knowledge from you. They misdirect in various ways. He was hard put by depth of knowledge of your questioning, and that's why later questions were more forthcoming. At some point he plumbed the depth of your understanding and so at the end he mostly had his feet. under him again - IPV6 was a red herring to tell you he knew you were out of your depth at that point - but it was too late by then to take back the most damaging admissions, though he did try and muddy the water a little.
Don't underestimate him. He really is a smart guy and understands how little the best judge and juror understand about this stuff. I don't doubt they select venue and jurors for that lack of understanding if they can. He probably does have the skills to do this investigation as well as can be done with available technology, and knows how fallible his data is. Your questioning just revealed that he didn't take the trouble to do that, not that he can't. It wasn't necessary before to take the trouble. Now he knows it is, and so his customers will actually have to pay him more for the more thorough effort.
Whether the current tech makes the job possible in the narrow scope of this case is debatable, bordering on dubious, but that's not the point. The funny part is both that this quality of expert testimony is almost always good enough and that people faced with this quality of evidence most often settle, and that PHBs consider the products from this quality of engineer to be more than the snake oil they are.
Anyway, this wasn't his "A" game. If you see him again be ready for a better challenge.
I was surprised to see you not ask about clock calibration, time zones and such. I was expecting that. Maybe next time. When comparing logs from two systems an understanding of how the clocks relate to each other is important.
Completely unrelated: You are reading this from "behind a router". From your point of view all of the Internet is "behind" that router. The practical limit of how many devices can be behind that router is "all of them except your PC and the router itself". The theoretical limit is as many devices as could be constructed from the available mass. That's what he meant by "limited".
If you know anything about networking, network security and P2P, this deposition is hilarious. It's like a Monty Python skit. If you don't you can probably skip it.
Yeah, that was sloppy, as I told the last corrector. Thanks for the catch. The two are linked in my mind because I lost all my Huffman RLE source code in an Stacked RLL drive crash.
Sloppy thinking. I must be getting old. Something good came of it though - I switched to implementing LZW, which is much better and was more educational as well.
I'm sure that if an asteroid wiped out the capital of some tinpot dictator that the UN would respond. They would have no trouble building enough consensus to write the Oort cloud a stern letter.
I don't have an opinion on the comments. I was interested in why the guy might make these comments in an opinion piece in Business Week, so I looked him up. I found the background on him informative about why he would hold such an opinion, so I shared it. Some moderators found that informative as well and it was modded up, otherwise you might not have seen it.
As to attacking, well, maybe my writing style is a little abrasive. I do try to make it more interesting to read and it does come out pretty strident sometimes. What I'm going for is more artful, but I lack the skill so far. I'm working on that.
Heuristics. They're an ancient art, but they can work.
Also, default deny. It's annoying to answer the question, "Do you want to connect to x4rubotnet%a7b.ru?" but it's more annoying not to be asked. If your users have no legitimate reason to be accessing.cn,.ru or other.?? addresses there's no reason to configure your DNS to give legitimate returns for those as an organization. Likewise for the more vile quadrants of the IP space. For some networks it's better just not to ask.
Sure, it causes a Balkanization of the Internet, but end users do the darnedest things, sometimes when they don't intend to. The unfortunate part about hyperlinks is that they are so easy to click. Corralling the Internet for them to sites in civilized territory is better than letting them wander off that cliff. Especially when their PC becomes a chain that drags the rest of your network over the cliff with them.
Or (gasp!) you could run an OS that's less susceptible to following him off the cliff?
Stuart Cohen today is chief executive officer of the Open Source Development Labs. With more than 22 years of international sales and marketing experience, he is a seasoned technology industry executive and has served in a variety of executive roles. Most recently, Cohen was vice president and corporate officer at RadiSys Corporation where his responsibilities included strategic partnership development with other industry leaders including IBM, HP and Dell. Prior to RadiSys, Stuart was vice president of worldwide marketing and a corporate officer at InFocus Corporation. Stuart spent 17 years with IBM, where he held senior positions in the US sales & marketing division, and the IBM Personal Computer Company and Networking Division, with international business development responsibilities in Europe, Southeast Asia and China. Stuart holds a B.S. in Quantitative Business Analysis from Arizona State University.
So... a corporate marketdroid that never invented anything, never built a business, who coattailed himself into executive positions with minor players based on prior employment relationships with major players who has a B.S. in Quantitative Business Analysis. Who, coincidentally is trying to bridge free software and services in a for-pay model that's starving for attention?
I'm gonna go with... um... so they couldn't get an Enderle quote? Was Maureen O'Gara busy that day? How did this guy talk his way into OSDL? It's interesting that their Wikipedia page mentions him not at all.
You've already been told to get a lawyer so we're done with the legal advice. Some of these folks might be lawyers, but they're not your lawyer so when you need legal advice, get one. He'll tell you to negotiate, though, and whatever you agree to get it in writing.
Now let's talk about the ethical issues. The ethical issue is that a deal is a deal is a deal. Know your deal, make sure the other side knows the deal, and stick to your deal even if you don't like it later. That's ethics.
Now for fun let's discuss the moral implications of your school demanding ownership of your output, which is paid for by somebody else. Dude, that sucks. That doesn't sound like somebody who would stick to their end of the deal. So get a lawyer, negotiate hard and get your deal in writing - or make a deal with somebody else instead.
A lot of things need to be fixed in the current US healthcare system. However, a lot of "stick it to them" solutions that are suggested just won't work in the long term.
I have one suggestion which isn't a "stick it to them" cure, but doesn't improve the situation for the poor. Most providers of care will not schedule or treat people who have no insurance, even if they're able to pay. This is just plain wrong and should be legally prohibited. Punitive "discounts" negotiated by insurer "groups" that do absolutely nothing except cement the physician-insurer codependence and drive up the cost for "cash" customers should be prohibited by law. Worse than improving the costs for covered insured, the required paperwork actually multiplies the costs to provide the care, the costs to the covered insured and through negative discounting deprives cash customers of care they would be able to afford otherwise. This is much of the nonsense that is making perfectly good doctors decide to quit practice. Doctors, dentists and other care providers should be required to publish a fee schedule and while they might be permitted to refuse care to those unable to pay, they should not be permitted to refuse service based on how their services are paid for, whether through insurance or for cash.
The money does say "for all debts" right on it after all.
The problems are very systematic, and while drastic change is needed what we need to do is figure out how the system should work (in detail) and slowly move in that direction.
Your post seems quite reasonable, right up until the last sentence. There will be no gradual change in the direction you want. All the money, political influence, law and self-interest of the people involved is actually pushing in the opposite direction and making headway toward making insurance compulsory, care expensive and scarce, medicine unobtainable my many. That the system is funded by the victims of its tyranny would be ironic except that this is how such systems become entrenched. Against such an array of power there is no hope for the safe, gradual evolution of a better system. There is revolution or nothing. A revolution in healthcare would be a messy, painful, chaotic and unpredictable thing - you never know how it's going to end up. Many would suffer, some would die. But then many suffer and some are dying from the present system and the suffering and death compounds daily. If we have any hope to end the suffering and death caused by the current healthcare system, we need that revolution in healthcare.
However, I do think it is inevitable that socialized medicine will take over
Here I disagree in a limited way about the inevitability only. The AMA does a huge amount of damage by driving up the cost of medical learning and rate-limiting the certification of new doctors - a role that should be performed by the government only so we can shut them down at no cost. Limited immunity to torts would help bring down the costs a lot of which is for care paid for by the government - huge savings there. Government licensing of practitioners and providers, and government oversight of revocations and discipline to replace the current system of self-regulation would help too - here's a jobs stimulus, maybe a retraining opportunity for the displaced lawyers and insurance processors. Limiting patent protection on drugs or eliminating it entirely would help - the current system favors only the exploitive lawyers and firms like the heinous example from my link above. A deliberate program to fix the supply side by retraining displaced workers into healthcare would fix that. The abolition of medical insurance for a brief hiatus while these evil companies that manipulate the market to prevent care to the uninsured die off and are replaced by heavily regulated alternatives is in order (or here's your socialized medicine alternative, but as a bridge plan to be phased out). Serious penalties for profiteering style pricing would be good too. $25 for an aspirin? $35 for a cotton swab? That's 5-7 in a federal pen for the practitioner and decertification for the site. Charging $25 for a aspirin just because it's dispensed in an ICU is the moral equivalent of the $5000 hurricane generator.
Oh, and a paperwork reduction act: no bill for any medical treatment may exceed one page of normal type in aggregate for all providers at the same site per calendar day. There is absolutely no need for the hugely detailed and intricate fee schedule coding paperwork besides the prevention of care or the laborious denial of benefits for care which is deemed proper by the expert on hand (the physician) which is never appropriate.
These are all revolutionary changes. They fix the real problem if applied together. They can't be applied gradually, and won't work individually.
Sigh, and they aren't going to happen either. I guess we're even. But at least if I'm wishing I'm going to wish for a real cure and not a band-aid. I'm not proposing that healthcare attempt to be made universal, or that heart transplants be extended to the indigent. I'm just proposing that the accumulated wasteful system set up to prevent access to care be dismantled - not gradually or incrementally but all at once and permanently. And like I said, it ain't gonna happen. Oh, well. At least I can pay to keep me and mine covered under the current broken system.
We would be remiss without mentioning the negative effects of using Stacker or Doublespace on an RLL hard drive.
RLL = Run Length Limited compression. The drive itself is compressed, and reports available space based upon anticipated compressibility of future data.
STacker - filesystem that compresses the data stored in a way that's not reducible by said hard drive.
Your interest in the medicine piece indicates that you're not thinking holistically about the problem. That's a bad way of thinking because it allows each corner of the medical care triumvirate - drugs, doctors and insurance - to point their finger at the other and evade responsibility. At this level, blame assessment is not a part of problem solving. It does not matter whose fault it is. The whole system is broken and I'm not going to let you hold up your corner as blameless. You share responsibility with the other two. If we are to solve this problem you all have to go.
So, back in 1995 if you needed lisinopril for blood pressure reduction you would have paid quite a bit for it, and today it is very affordable.
Clearly I'm not getting through to you. If you have no access to a doctor, you can't get a prescription for any prescription drug. Not Lisinopril, not Crestor, not (thankfully) Phen-Phen. You can't get Erythromycin, you can't get nitroglycerin, you can't get Penicillin if your life depends on it. And if you don't have access to drugs discovered over 100 years ago, what reason do you have to care about the preservation of intellectual property rights on drugs invented in the distant future? That was my question and you've given no answer.
That is the condition that millions of Americans and billions of humans are in. They have good reason to care for the end of the system that prevents care: all of it - intellectual property rights, drug regulation, doctor certification. They need care and they aren't getting it. You're not proposing a system that helps them and I am: end the whole scheme and let people who know how help people who need help with what we have now and what we know now. Train more to use the tools we have, give them the tools and set them to work. We have the people. We have the raw materials. We could end much suffering quickly and at low cost. Have you got some better answer to this problem? I'd love to read it.
it isn't reasonable to expect a poor person to get the same level of care as Donald Trump.
Perhaps it is too much to expect that the poor can get a tooth pulled? I'm not poor now but I have been. One day I got a tooth pulled by sitting patiently in the dentist's office until he pulled it out of sheer pity. The pain had me on the edge of violence. I have coverage now, but I know about being poor. The infection in that tooth might have killed me by now. This simple level of care is denied to millions of Americans and billions of humans in the world today. I pay and pay and pay. I and my family are quite healthy - we haven't needed $500 worth of care for the last $24K I've paid in, but I have to pay anyway because the uncovered get no care at all, at any price. Right now I'm paying 30 times the whole annual income of a chinese farmer each year to ensure that my family has access to care if they should need it, and that farmer? He might as well consult a shaman for all the help he's going to get from modern medicine. That needs to get fixed even if we must have real social change to make it happen.
Cruelty in delivery negates the contribution of innovation in discovery and learning. Companies that provide medicine have forfeited their right to profit from their research by the cruel method of restricting access to the benefits. Doctors negate their right to due profit from the work they do to learn their trade by the cruelty of limiting their care to the insured and limiting the pool of doctors by rate-limiting the approval of new doctors. Insurance companies forfeit their monopoly over care by cruelly depriving the insured of care to limit the costs and maximize profits. The AMA forfeits its responsibility, well, just because it exists and we're in the state we're in. The system is broken and a total rethink of the whole thing would be a good idea. Doctors who really care would agree.
What cause do the millions that have no access to current drugs have to care about the invention of future drugs they'll have no access to? None. The issue is as irrelevant to them as the price of rocket fare to the ISS. There are enough people in that strait who care not a whit about your precious intellectual property to induce some social change if they were aware of their lack. Their lack is a direct result of the system we've put in place to protect the inventors of drugs and being denied life saving medicine they are entitled to resent that system. You say invention will stop. That seems unlikely, but what of it to them? They don't stand to benefit from its continuance. Why should they care?
Slashdot Mirror
You lost me at x arguments were true, therefore x arguments are not true. Could you please start over again with more steps?
Cloud is a nice, nebulous term. I would count the people who really know what it means to be less than one hundred in all the world.
I'm guessing from your post and its related link that you're not one of those.
The cloud is a symbolic abstraction that separates the served from the servers in the same way that client/server architecture does, except that it adds an additional layer of abstraction for "server" that allows for servers to be hosted anywhere redundantly and transparently. It assumes a number of things, including ubiquitous networking, failover from geographically disparate servers, and the persistent reliability of service providers. That last can be avoided by designing the architecture yourself and becoming your own service provider.
Now I'm going to cover the idea of command and control. The cloud becomes a useful element of your command and control iff (if and only if) you own all of the disparate parts of it. Any other answer adds a lack of control to your architechture you cannot control if you must persist for longer than the solitary existence of your service provider.
This doesn't eliminate the cloud's utility - it just limits its scope. It's a grand idea and you should use it to the extent that you maintain control of your own cloud. To do anything else is not responsible. You must design your cloud so that the servers are owned by you and the connection service is provided by redundant providers. That's what botnet spammers do and you owe your customers no less.
I'm going to question the utility of that. A judge can learn. A juror can learn. You cannot drag up the average judge and jury and you should not hope for that. It's neither a judge nor juror's job to understand technology, nor should it be. It's the job of experts to make the utility of technology available to the common man, without the need to understand its underlying complexity. It's no more beneficial to the common person to teach him the principles of network architecture than to teach him to be a medical diagnostician or to teach him to be expert in the nuances of bankruptcy law. Noone can become expert in everything -- that's why we have experts. The job of the experts is to make the underlying complexity possible to use by designing a useful simplified interface to it. Because you bridge the gap because of your practice specialty makes you special squared and your job doubly hard. You've done well, but like me you're old and your ability to internalize new concepts is limited. It would be nice if you found a nice young tech/legal person to be your apprentice.
Getting pre-educated judges and juries is wishful thinking. I think the utility is in educating the good lawyers and hoping they don't turn to the dark side, which is bordering on fatal optimism, I know, but it's preferable to getting the knowledgable to earn law degrees and begin practice of law - that would be like pissing in the font of wisdom. You've made great strides in getting educated and I owe you a due debt both for your achievements and for much amusement in the process.
I respect and admire you. You have given me, and everybody, much benefit both in your successes and your failures. Yet I would caution you. I would prefer that you continue to be successful in your path, and so I would caution you to avoid an excess of zeal. Though your limited constituency here in geekland holds you up high, you have not and will not earn the respect of the common man. You must not let our enthusiasm lead you to believe you have the support of everyone everywhere. That road leads to Jack Thompson's fate. You can be more moderate and modest and careful in your public expressions, and in my estimate you must if you are to continue to do well. Let us who rant and rave anonymously, like me and twitter, beat your drum for you in the most extreme cases. You need not make your case more dramatic than it is -- you are the very voice of reason against the tyranny of monopoly and madness of submission to it.
And forgive me for advocating the end of copyright and patents. Although I know you don't support it, you must agree that it would end your struggle to defend people against the evil **AA monopolies. It would also put a lot of lawyers out of work. I like you, but most of us would consider that last a good thing. Yes, in the short term there would be social costs, and in the long term it would need to be reinstated again with careful limits. Still, I see no real cure but to kill the whole tree, root and branch - and start afresh with our current understanding of the risks.
Pearls::Swine
Eclipse is nice. Some people like gedit, others various versions of vi or emacs.
/asbestos>
Trapped in the amber of Entropy, existing in the continuum of usefulness between infinitely close but unreachable alternative choices more and less useful which define the code utility metaverse.
What is that, like 500 lines?
a photodetector that can produce multiple levels of output
I had wondered how long it would take for this to be investigated. I thought it would be a while yet, as there's still a lot of dark fiber out there. Thanks for the update. As we move back and forth between analog and binary quanta it amazes me how swiftly entire fields switch, seemingly overnight, from the one to the other and back again. I suppose one day we'll be communicating with real quanta and we'll be stuck in binary for a while with single photon emitter/detector pairs. And then someone will figure out that time is analog and we'll multiply the bandwidth again with time domain encoding.
By comparison, you probably know better than me about how LZW and DEFLATE have been superseded. (Which is also hugely interesting in the delay-state-bandwidth-energy computing relationship).
Of course, it was a long time ago. I haven't seen an RLL drive for 20 years. LZW has lost the crown on compression size but as a lightweight algorithm it does still have some appeal, and the fact that the patents have expired makes it more interesting. You are quite correct that LZW is an important lesson in both programming and information theory. I feel implementing it from the original ACM papers would be a useful lesson for both math majors and comp-sci majors. Definitely worth a few days of a 300 level class.
An element of painful truth is what makes us laugh. The RIAA story has it.
So he may not be much of a technology expert, but he's a good strong arm man.
I think he is expert. His skills might not be current, but some of his answers seem to rely on an expected lack of knowledge from you. They misdirect in various ways. He was hard put by depth of knowledge of your questioning, and that's why later questions were more forthcoming. At some point he plumbed the depth of your understanding and so at the end he mostly had his feet. under him again - IPV6 was a red herring to tell you he knew you were out of your depth at that point - but it was too late by then to take back the most damaging admissions, though he did try and muddy the water a little.
Don't underestimate him. He really is a smart guy and understands how little the best judge and juror understand about this stuff. I don't doubt they select venue and jurors for that lack of understanding if they can. He probably does have the skills to do this investigation as well as can be done with available technology, and knows how fallible his data is. Your questioning just revealed that he didn't take the trouble to do that, not that he can't. It wasn't necessary before to take the trouble. Now he knows it is, and so his customers will actually have to pay him more for the more thorough effort.
Whether the current tech makes the job possible in the narrow scope of this case is debatable, bordering on dubious, but that's not the point. The funny part is both that this quality of expert testimony is almost always good enough and that people faced with this quality of evidence most often settle, and that PHBs consider the products from this quality of engineer to be more than the snake oil they are.
Anyway, this wasn't his "A" game. If you see him again be ready for a better challenge.
I was surprised to see you not ask about clock calibration, time zones and such. I was expecting that. Maybe next time. When comparing logs from two systems an understanding of how the clocks relate to each other is important.
Completely unrelated: You are reading this from "behind a router". From your point of view all of the Internet is "behind" that router. The practical limit of how many devices can be behind that router is "all of them except your PC and the router itself". The theoretical limit is as many devices as could be constructed from the available mass. That's what he meant by "limited".
Far better than I expected for an RIAA expert.
If you know anything about networking, network security and P2P, this deposition is hilarious. It's like a Monty Python skit. If you don't you can probably skip it.
Thanks to NYCL for a good read.
Yeah, that was sloppy, as I told the last corrector. Thanks for the catch. The two are linked in my mind because I lost all my Huffman RLE source code in an Stacked RLL drive crash.
Sloppy thinking. I must be getting old. Something good came of it though - I switched to implementing LZW, which is much better and was more educational as well.
For true disaster preparedness the only solution is a backup hot site. Mars would be nice.
I'm sure that if an asteroid wiped out the capital of some tinpot dictator that the UN would respond. They would have no trouble building enough consensus to write the Oort cloud a stern letter.
I don't have an opinion on the comments. I was interested in why the guy might make these comments in an opinion piece in Business Week, so I looked him up. I found the background on him informative about why he would hold such an opinion, so I shared it. Some moderators found that informative as well and it was modded up, otherwise you might not have seen it.
As to attacking, well, maybe my writing style is a little abrasive. I do try to make it more interesting to read and it does come out pretty strident sometimes. What I'm going for is more artful, but I lack the skill so far. I'm working on that.
Heuristics. They're an ancient art, but they can work.
Also, default deny. It's annoying to answer the question, "Do you want to connect to x4rubotnet%a7b.ru?" but it's more annoying not to be asked. If your users have no legitimate reason to be accessing .cn, .ru or other .?? addresses there's no reason to configure your DNS to give legitimate returns for those as an organization. Likewise for the more vile quadrants of the IP space. For some networks it's better just not to ask.
Sure, it causes a Balkanization of the Internet, but end users do the darnedest things, sometimes when they don't intend to. The unfortunate part about hyperlinks is that they are so easy to click. Corralling the Internet for them to sites in civilized territory is better than letting them wander off that cliff. Especially when their PC becomes a chain that drags the rest of your network over the cliff with them.
Or (gasp!) you could run an OS that's less susceptible to following him off the cliff?
Stuart Cohen today is chief executive officer of the Open Source Development Labs. With more than 22 years of international sales and marketing experience, he is a seasoned technology industry executive and has served in a variety of executive roles. Most recently, Cohen was vice president and corporate officer at RadiSys Corporation where his responsibilities included strategic partnership development with other industry leaders including IBM, HP and Dell. Prior to RadiSys, Stuart was vice president of worldwide marketing and a corporate officer at InFocus Corporation. Stuart spent 17 years with IBM, where he held senior positions in the US sales & marketing division, and the IBM Personal Computer Company and Networking Division, with international business development responsibilities in Europe, Southeast Asia and China. Stuart holds a B.S. in Quantitative Business Analysis from Arizona State University.
LinuxWorld
So... a corporate marketdroid that never invented anything, never built a business, who coattailed himself into executive positions with minor players based on prior employment relationships with major players who has a B.S. in Quantitative Business Analysis. Who, coincidentally is trying to bridge free software and services in a for-pay model that's starving for attention?
I'm gonna go with... um... so they couldn't get an Enderle quote? Was Maureen O'Gara busy that day? How did this guy talk his way into OSDL? It's interesting that their Wikipedia page mentions him not at all.
You've already been told to get a lawyer so we're done with the legal advice. Some of these folks might be lawyers, but they're not your lawyer so when you need legal advice, get one. He'll tell you to negotiate, though, and whatever you agree to get it in writing.
Now let's talk about the ethical issues. The ethical issue is that a deal is a deal is a deal. Know your deal, make sure the other side knows the deal, and stick to your deal even if you don't like it later. That's ethics.
Now for fun let's discuss the moral implications of your school demanding ownership of your output, which is paid for by somebody else. Dude, that sucks. That doesn't sound like somebody who would stick to their end of the deal. So get a lawyer, negotiate hard and get your deal in writing - or make a deal with somebody else instead.
That was easy. NEXT!
A lot of things need to be fixed in the current US healthcare system. However, a lot of "stick it to them" solutions that are suggested just won't work in the long term.
I have one suggestion which isn't a "stick it to them" cure, but doesn't improve the situation for the poor. Most providers of care will not schedule or treat people who have no insurance, even if they're able to pay. This is just plain wrong and should be legally prohibited. Punitive "discounts" negotiated by insurer "groups" that do absolutely nothing except cement the physician-insurer codependence and drive up the cost for "cash" customers should be prohibited by law. Worse than improving the costs for covered insured, the required paperwork actually multiplies the costs to provide the care, the costs to the covered insured and through negative discounting deprives cash customers of care they would be able to afford otherwise. This is much of the nonsense that is making perfectly good doctors decide to quit practice. Doctors, dentists and other care providers should be required to publish a fee schedule and while they might be permitted to refuse care to those unable to pay, they should not be permitted to refuse service based on how their services are paid for, whether through insurance or for cash.
The money does say "for all debts" right on it after all.
The problems are very systematic, and while drastic change is needed what we need to do is figure out how the system should work (in detail) and slowly move in that direction.
Your post seems quite reasonable, right up until the last sentence. There will be no gradual change in the direction you want. All the money, political influence, law and self-interest of the people involved is actually pushing in the opposite direction and making headway toward making insurance compulsory, care expensive and scarce, medicine unobtainable my many. That the system is funded by the victims of its tyranny would be ironic except that this is how such systems become entrenched. Against such an array of power there is no hope for the safe, gradual evolution of a better system. There is revolution or nothing. A revolution in healthcare would be a messy, painful, chaotic and unpredictable thing - you never know how it's going to end up. Many would suffer, some would die. But then many suffer and some are dying from the present system and the suffering and death compounds daily. If we have any hope to end the suffering and death caused by the current healthcare system, we need that revolution in healthcare.
However, I do think it is inevitable that socialized medicine will take over
Here I disagree in a limited way about the inevitability only. The AMA does a huge amount of damage by driving up the cost of medical learning and rate-limiting the certification of new doctors - a role that should be performed by the government only so we can shut them down at no cost. Limited immunity to torts would help bring down the costs a lot of which is for care paid for by the government - huge savings there. Government licensing of practitioners and providers, and government oversight of revocations and discipline to replace the current system of self-regulation would help too - here's a jobs stimulus, maybe a retraining opportunity for the displaced lawyers and insurance processors. Limiting patent protection on drugs or eliminating it entirely would help - the current system favors only the exploitive lawyers and firms like the heinous example from my link above. A deliberate program to fix the supply side by retraining displaced workers into healthcare would fix that. The abolition of medical insurance for a brief hiatus while these evil companies that manipulate the market to prevent care to the uninsured die off and are replaced by heavily regulated alternatives is in order (or here's your socialized medicine alternative, but as a bridge plan to be phased out). Serious penalties for profiteering style pricing would be good too. $25 for an aspirin? $35 for a cotton swab? That's 5-7 in a federal pen for the practitioner and decertification for the site. Charging $25 for a aspirin just because it's dispensed in an ICU is the moral equivalent of the $5000 hurricane generator.
Oh, and a paperwork reduction act: no bill for any medical treatment may exceed one page of normal type in aggregate for all providers at the same site per calendar day. There is absolutely no need for the hugely detailed and intricate fee schedule coding paperwork besides the prevention of care or the laborious denial of benefits for care which is deemed proper by the expert on hand (the physician) which is never appropriate.
These are all revolutionary changes. They fix the real problem if applied together. They can't be applied gradually, and won't work individually.
Sigh, and they aren't going to happen either. I guess we're even. But at least if I'm wishing I'm going to wish for a real cure and not a band-aid. I'm not proposing that healthcare attempt to be made universal, or that heart transplants be extended to the indigent. I'm just proposing that the accumulated wasteful system set up to prevent access to care be dismantled - not gradually or incrementally but all at once and permanently. And like I said, it ain't gonna happen. Oh, well. At least I can pay to keep me and mine covered under the current broken system.
Oops. Good catch.
We would be remiss without mentioning the negative effects of using Stacker or Doublespace on an RLL hard drive.
RLL = Run Length Limited compression. The drive itself is compressed, and reports available space based upon anticipated compressibility of future data.
STacker - filesystem that compresses the data stored in a way that's not reducible by said hard drive.
Hard drive crash is inevitable.
Your interest in the medicine piece indicates that you're not thinking holistically about the problem. That's a bad way of thinking because it allows each corner of the medical care triumvirate - drugs, doctors and insurance - to point their finger at the other and evade responsibility. At this level, blame assessment is not a part of problem solving. It does not matter whose fault it is. The whole system is broken and I'm not going to let you hold up your corner as blameless. You share responsibility with the other two. If we are to solve this problem you all have to go.
So, back in 1995 if you needed lisinopril for blood pressure reduction you would have paid quite a bit for it, and today it is very affordable.
Clearly I'm not getting through to you. If you have no access to a doctor, you can't get a prescription for any prescription drug. Not Lisinopril, not Crestor, not (thankfully) Phen-Phen. You can't get Erythromycin, you can't get nitroglycerin, you can't get Penicillin if your life depends on it. And if you don't have access to drugs discovered over 100 years ago, what reason do you have to care about the preservation of intellectual property rights on drugs invented in the distant future? That was my question and you've given no answer.
That is the condition that millions of Americans and billions of humans are in. They have good reason to care for the end of the system that prevents care: all of it - intellectual property rights, drug regulation, doctor certification. They need care and they aren't getting it. You're not proposing a system that helps them and I am: end the whole scheme and let people who know how help people who need help with what we have now and what we know now. Train more to use the tools we have, give them the tools and set them to work. We have the people. We have the raw materials. We could end much suffering quickly and at low cost. Have you got some better answer to this problem? I'd love to read it.
it isn't reasonable to expect a poor person to get the same level of care as Donald Trump.
Perhaps it is too much to expect that the poor can get a tooth pulled? I'm not poor now but I have been. One day I got a tooth pulled by sitting patiently in the dentist's office until he pulled it out of sheer pity. The pain had me on the edge of violence. I have coverage now, but I know about being poor. The infection in that tooth might have killed me by now. This simple level of care is denied to millions of Americans and billions of humans in the world today. I pay and pay and pay. I and my family are quite healthy - we haven't needed $500 worth of care for the last $24K I've paid in, but I have to pay anyway because the uncovered get no care at all, at any price. Right now I'm paying 30 times the whole annual income of a chinese farmer each year to ensure that my family has access to care if they should need it, and that farmer? He might as well consult a shaman for all the help he's going to get from modern medicine. That needs to get fixed even if we must have real social change to make it happen.
Cruelty in delivery negates the contribution of innovation in discovery and learning. Companies that provide medicine have forfeited their right to profit from their research by the cruel method of restricting access to the benefits. Doctors negate their right to due profit from the work they do to learn their trade by the cruelty of limiting their care to the insured and limiting the pool of doctors by rate-limiting the approval of new doctors. Insurance companies forfeit their monopoly over care by cruelly depriving the insured of care to limit the costs and maximize profits. The AMA forfeits its responsibility, well, just because it exists and we're in the state we're in. The system is broken and a total rethink of the whole thing would be a good idea. Doctors who really care would agree.
What cause do the millions that have no access to current drugs have to care about the invention of future drugs they'll have no access to? None. The issue is as irrelevant to them as the price of rocket fare to the ISS. There are enough people in that strait who care not a whit about your precious intellectual property to induce some social change if they were aware of their lack. Their lack is a direct result of the system we've put in place to protect the inventors of drugs and being denied life saving medicine they are entitled to resent that system. You say invention will stop. That seems unlikely, but what of it to them? They don't stand to benefit from its continuance. Why should they care?
The thing that distinguishes various pundits on IT from RMS is compromise. He won't. They will. He's survived four generations of them.
I love the guy. He's wacky, he's quirky, and he's right.
If you prefer to keep with the way we're going, this is an example of where that leads.