But there are many science and engineering jobs with poor pay. Pay for postdocs is low, and shamefully low for grad students taking on teaching fellowships. Internships are another. New or near grads who may already be burdened with massive student loan debt are sold a bill of goods, told that part of their pay is the "valuable" experience they gain, and this justifies paying them a pittance, or even nothing at all-- the infamous unpaid internship.
And if that isn't enough, what about employers who cheat their regular employees, not just the poor interns? One of the biggest problems with joining some small edgy startup, being mesmerized with the potential, suckered into dreams of great success, wealth, and fame, is that the odds of success are much poorer than they want to believe or admit. The finance folks tend to keep the engineers in the dark about the company's finances, until they can't make payroll. They borrow their engineer's time, knowing full well that if sales continue at the same level this month as in the previous 6 plus months, they will not be able to pay, but wishfully hoping that this month will be different. So the poor engineer wasn't told, and doesn't find out until they've taken a month of work that they can't pay for. Indeed management tends to view engineers as chumps too dumb and narrow to see the larger picture, and also as arrogant about their intelligence, so why not take them to the cleaners and get a little kick out of putting one over on those smarty pants? Helps soothe the sting of failure to screw over a bunch of arrogant engineers they've been jealous of since grade school math class. Then they usually have the cheek to say that the situation will surely improve shortly, the corner will be turned any day now, and ask that the engineers now volunteer further time and effort for free, to be paid back later only if the company succeeds of course. Show your commitment and passion, yeah!
The 1099 can be another way to cheat the engineer. The engineer is once again suckered with visions of glorious independence and freedom while the "contractee" (*cough* employer *cough*) gets out of all kinds of pesky labor regulations and overhead pay like contributing to unemployment and retirement funds.
There are some head hunting agencies that are positively predatory. One that I recall insisted that job seekers sign a contract that stated that the employer will pay the agency 1/3 of the new employee's first year of pay, and that if the employer fails to pay this money, then the employee is on the hook for it! I had visions of this being turned into a little scam. Get hired by an employer in cahoots with the agency and who never intended to keep you but instead plans to come up with an excuse to fire you in 91 days. Earn 3 months of pay, owe 4 months of pay. Profit!
And where is the government while employees are being fleeced? In the employers' corner, having been bought off with generous campaign donations. Might even send the police in to do some union busting.
Not at all silly. Recording equipment always filters and misses some data before it ever reaches a storage device. An audio CD may be a downsampled version. A lossless format like FLAC can't help with that. Main reason to use FLAC is for editing. If all one means to do with the audio is listen, why not be intelligent about what to toss, and save a lot more space?
And it's a lot more fun than MS vs Linux, Java vs.NET, Nvidia vs AMD, or even vi vs emacs. Sorry "gcc or llvm", your grudge match will have to settle for a 3 AM slot on a low budget, obscure science light cable TV channel.
The big language demolition derby is still hot and furious, like the annual playoffs of old sports that still excite fans, if you can see past all the smoking wrecks like Modula and the entire team of modular programming cluttering the arena. If only the Perl 6 team could sort out their engine troubles and get their car into the arena, replace that sputtering Perl 5 vehicle and challenge that JavaScript/CSS/HTML/AJAX monstrousity that was cobbled together from a dozen different brands of automobiles, and that C++ bug that still works after being run over and rolled over and which just got a fresh set of wheels. OOP sponsors must be wondering which teams are still proud to bear their logos. And where's Haskell? Oh yes, loudly honking their horns from atop the safety of their functional programming pedestal while the LISP car circles round and round as if they expect a ramp to appear at any moment. Python? Dancing around the LAMP pole with PHP's go-kart. In one of the darker corners of the arena are the excruciatingly slow horse drawn wagons of the Fortran and Cobol teams, just trying to hold their ground. Follow the oil slick to find C. Java is struggling to move under the crushing weight of their massive armor, spare parts, and the huge gas tanks needed to feed their too thirsty engine. The kids would still love those Logo toy cars they used to hand out last century.
If coding is so universal, what language should everyone learn? We're nowhere near sorting that out. Shouldn't we be able to settle and standardize on the essential elements of a programming language? As it is, it's like arguments over mathematical notation. Multiplication works the same whether the symbol used is x or * or a dot or nothing at all because it's the default operation. But it's not so easy to tell what is trivial and what is important in programming languages.
Guess the world shouldn't have thrown Word Perfect under the bus?
Or, how about Word Star? There was a time when its editing keystrokes were widely adopted, like in Borland's integrated development environments.
Or, why not use LaTeX? Admittedly, it's a bit of a learning curve, but you can just bang out text, and worry about formatting later, even change it around relatively easily.
It should be legal to copy music. Artists can be compensated, with money, in many other ways. Don't have to put tolls and restrictions on the copying of information, in order to fairly compensate artists.
Educating our enemies might enlighten them so that they are no longer our enemies. Sure would be a lot cheaper that way than starting another war, you know, like in Iraq, over Weapons of Mass Destruction that didn't exist.
We should better educate ourselves. Too much of what passes for education in the US and the West is indoctrination. Read some Noam Chomsky and A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn for a bit of perspective.
It always amazes me how many very narrowly educated people there are. I used to think a Bachelor of Arts degree was a watered down, wimpy sort of college degree and the Bachelor of Science was the way to go. Now, after encountering quite a few people who know technical stuff like how to be a good code monkey but are utterly ignorant of philosophy and the basics of science and rational thought, I wonder if an Arts degree was meant to deal with precisely that problem. Every person with a college degree should be equipped to understand that, for example, Creationism is bunk.
I agree. Recompiling is not a big deal. C/C++ is standardized. The heavy lifting is the creation of standard libraries, and any sensible chip and system vendor will help do that because it's absolutely necessary. This is not the same thing as porting from an Oracle database to MariaDB or some other DB. That's a big job because every database has their own unique set of extensions to SQL.
x86 never was a good architecture. It was crap when it was created back in the 1970s, crap even when compared to other CISC architectures of that era, and despite tremendous improvement, it's still crap today. Motorola's 68000 series was superior. Intel went with a load/store design for the integer math, which is okay, but then for no good reason whatsoever they didn't stay consistent for the floating point math, opting for a horrible stack based approach. The reason the true underlying architecture of a modern x86 CPU is RISC is that RISC is just that much better. Yes, so much better that even after allowing for the overhead in translating from x86 to RISC instructions, it is still faster than a CPU that executes x86 operations natively. They've done an amazing job of working around and amending the shortcomings of the x86 design, but it would be better to ditch the legacy cruft and make a fresh start. I mean, the instruction set has specialized instructions for handling packed decimal! And then there's the near worthless string search REPNE CMPSB family of instructions. The Boyer-Moore string search algorithm is much faster, and dates back to 1977. Another sad thing is that for some CPUs, the built in DIV instruction was so slow that sometimes it was faster to do integer division with shifts and subtracts. That's a serious knock on Intel that they did such a poor job of implementing DIV. A long time criticism of the x86 architecture has been that it has too few registers, and what it does have is much too specialized. Like, only AX and DX can be used for integer multiplication and division. And BX is for indexing, and CX is for looping (B is for base and C is for count you know-- it's like the designers took their inspiration from Sesame Street's Cookie Monster and the Count!) This forces a lot of juggling to move data in and out of the few registers that can do the desired operation. This particular problem has been much alleviated by the addition of more registers and shadow registers, but that doesn't address the numerous other problems. Yet another feature that is obsolete is the CALL and RET and of course the PUSH and POP instructions, because once again they used a stack. Standard thinking 40 years ago, but today, we know that more flexibility is better, and calls and returns can be achieved with a JMP instruction that stores a return address at a location determined through some indirection, rather than using a specialized CALL and RET instruction that pigs out on a precious register to hold and update a stack pointer for a call stack, and which is a pain to work around to implement things like tail end recursion. Finally, the support for task switching, virtual memory, and concurrency was lacking. Their so-called segmented memory architecture was terrible. The first attempt at OS level instructions, in the 80286, was so badly done that hardly anyone tried to use it. The 80386 was much better, but still lacked an atomic instruction for handling semaphores. Wasn't until the 80486 that they finally got it good enough to support a real OS. That's a big reason why PCs had such a poor reputation compared to Big Iron, and were often dismissed as toys.
That's not to say that ARM and other architectures don't have issues. But the x86-- it's like they were trying for the worst possible design they could think of.
simply abolishing all forms of IP protection is probably not a viable option
I think that abolishment is a viable option. Money can compensate people for revealing trade secrets. Don't have to give them a monopoly in order to give them money. The details of just how that should be done will need much hashing out, but it's doable, and being done by the likes of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, Monopoly protection on ideas has always been bad for innovation, and expensive, difficult, and problematical to enforce. It's only in recent times that this has become painfully obvious.
Someday, the exclamation "you stole my idea!" will sound utterly quaint and ridiculous, like accusing someone of using witchcraft to cause your cow or goat to sicken and die sounds today. Future generations will be glad that whatever else is good or bad about current times, they didn't live in the dark ages of intellectual property laws, when "making available" a mere 24 songs could trigger a witchhunt and a financial crucifixion.
Support for Ogg Vorbis is still hard to find. Some years ago, MS went to war in the US against Vorbis. The courts slapped MS down, but the effects still linger. On one mp3 player, to get the ability to play Vorbis, I had to download a European ROM for it, then trick its flash program into loading it since the program was coded to check which edition was already installed, and then refuse to update to any other edition than what it found. On another, had to install Rockbox. Car radios are still very lacking in support for Ogg Vorbis. Only practical way to get it is to make sure the radio has an audio input jack, and plug in the portable music player of your choice. For that matter way too may car radios still come with CD players. Who wants CDs anymore?
There's a new audio format, Opus. PC software is still catching up with that one.
Exactly. Science makes statements about the natural world. The supernatural is not something that can be tested.
To wit, an omnipotent being could have created the Earth and the whole universe 10 years ago, or 10 minutes ago, complete with people who have implanted memories of things that happened 20 plus years ago, and tons of evidence that make it look like the Earth is billions of years old. How can we tell the difference? How can we tell whether the Earth was created by some omnipotent being 100 or 6000 years ago, or any other number of years ago? We can't! There is no way to test supernatural notions. Does that make science worthless? Not at all. We knowingly operate with the provision that what we observe is in fact reality. It seems some people find it extremely disappointing that science cannot provide absolute answers to every question with no doubt whatsoever, and react by unfairly dismissing everything scientific methods have to say. They want Answers, and they don't understand or care they're asking too much of science.
Our observations of many different factors all point to the Earth being about 4.5 billion years old. Radioactive decay of many different elements all point to that same age. The ratio of hydrogen to helium and heavier elements in the Sun gives similar ages. A statistical analysis of the numbers of craters also points to great age. We are absolutely surrounded by geological features that could have come about through millions of years of natural processes such as erosion, but not mere thousands.
Lie, even perjure, and bankrupt thousands of home buyers, and get away with it. Because they're rich and powerful. Like the Queen of Mean said, "only the little people pay taxes" and, evidently, the consequences.
One thing that strikes me about all these high profile criminal and civil cases in the financial world is the supreme emphasis placed on not admitting any fault or guilt. They pay a fine, but they don't admit guilt. The explanation is, it seems, that admitting guilt would leave them vulnerable to all kinds of investor lawsuits. This deal being offered to Snowden, in which he starts by admitting guilt, doesn't sound like any deal at all. I think he'd be crazy to accept it. And maybe he shouldn't even negotiate, until US enforcers get serious about making a somewhat reasonable inital offer. An offer that includes admitting guilt smells bad, like they're just playing games with him, testing him to see if he's desperate or stupid or having a mental lapse.
Another thing to think about is how the law treated Aaron Swartz. Threaten him with extreme consequences in order to bully him into making a plea bargain. Prosecutors score a few points for being tough on crime, and Swartz spends a few months in prison, with the option to be held for much, much longer, because, hey, in that scenario he admitted guilt. Instead, Swartz took their extreme threats to heart, and suicided. It was a rotten deal anyway.
ATI/AMD promised decent performing open source drivers years ago. I would like to have seen this promise fulfilled much sooner. This is progress, but still not all they promised. Couple of years, sigh.
So I've bought in each camp. My 3 most recent computers--2 of which aren't very recent any more-- are an Intel CPU with Nvidia (a fanless GT 610, upgraded from the original 8500GT when the fan went bad), an AMD CPU with Radeon (HD 5400), and the newest is an Intel CPU with Intel's much improved HD line of integrated graphics (HD 4000). It's all low end graphics, just barely good enough to handle high end games at slow framerates and/or small resolutions. I'm more interested in low power, low noise, and reliability. I'm still waiting for a vendor to have high performance and quality open source offerings. Such a thing would inspire me to get a new desktop sooner.
How about using the law to prevent others from reverse engineering a product? Or jailing someone for investigating the security of a product, like what happened to Dmitry Sklyarov? That's not freedom, that's power no one should have, because it is too easy to abuse, and is abused. The DMCA takedown provision is routinely abused to hinder and silence perfectly legitimate competitors and critics. Many legitimate videos have been taken down from Youtube on the mere accusation of infringement, without any proof or due process, and some of it by robots sloppily programmed to do minimal checking and to presume guilt. The burden of proof is then upon the poster to prove innocence, rather than the accuser to prove guilt. And this is justified because "everyone is a pirate".
The "freedom" to keep others in the dark is too easy to abuse. It doesn't stop with being used only to protect "trade secrets". It has been used to hide problems, and deny responsibility for causing damages. And to unfairly burden others with all the work to clear their names, without even a clear accusation of such things as exactly what patents or copyrights have been infringed. And to disguise blatantly lying propaganda campaigns as science, fact, or truth.
All that is forcing others not to do what you don't like. When it is cheaper to cover up a problem by depriving others of freedom, causing them undue hardship and placing unreasonable burdens on them, which way do too many businesses choose to go, if they have the "freedom" of such options, backed up by government bullying? Yeah. That's censorship. That's shooting the messenger for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Even worse is the trolling, in which businesses arise solely for purposes of exploiting these hugely overreaching laws to blackmail others into paying them protection fees. The big players in the music and movie industry have all made the choice to accuse the entire world of piracy, and because we gave them the freedom to run roughshod over our rights so that they don't have to change and adapt the way the rest of us have to, they have stuck to their position no matter how crazy and wild the outcomes have become. Who still really thinks that Jammie Thomas should be penalized $1.92 million for sharing 24 songs online? Does anyone think every Linux user in the world should each pay SCO a $700 licensing fee? No one thinks that the world owes Big Entertainment $75 trillion. No one is fooled for long by ridiculous propaganda like Captain Copyright.
Freedom is not an absolute. Your freedoms end where others' begin. You are not free to enslave people, deny education to women as the Taliban wants to do, recklessly endanger property and lives, litter, trespass, and so on.
In this case, should vendors have the "freedom" to keep customers and users in the dark? That's why we still don't have good open source drivers for some vendors' products. Nice DRM is no better than nice slavery.
Giving up our natural right and ability to share knowledge with one another is far too high a price to pay in order to restrict transfers of knowledge to approved pay channels. If we did that, we might as well abandon democracy, as one of its requirements, public education, is a huge sharing of knowledge that is being done to the detriment of commercial interests' opportunity to profit. The money they make off of textbooks in no way matches the value of an education. Children should pay more, and should be taught not to steal! The alphabet itself is a subversive tool that allows people to write letters and steal from phone companies!
A home can do way better than 1000 kWh/month. Half the energy we use goes towards heating and cooling. In months when the temperature is mild and neither heating nor cooling is needed, we use only 300 kHw for a 4 bedroom home, and there is still room for improvement. It's not only possible to build a house that doesn't need much heating and cooling, it isn't even particularly hard or expensive. We had a home built in 1969 that without using the furnace could maintain 60F in the day in winter in the northern US thanks to a large window area on the southern side. (We know, because sometimes a blizzard would knock out the power for a few days.) A little more efficiency, and the home could have done without a furnace at all. Appliances are still improving. Our homes and lifestyles are incredibly stupidly wasteful, and there is a lot of low hanging fruit we could harvest if only we would.
How many of us are forced to drive to work for a job that could be done remotely? Why do we have to drive in? Because management thinks we're all lazy bums who will goof off if no one is standing over us with a sharp prod. And because the designs of our newer cities neglected to plan for any other mode of transport so that riding a bike or walking is suicidally dangerous. Why do we use clothes dryers? Because we've bought the idea that racks are too slow or take too much space, or are symbolic of a lowly impoverished status? How much hot water do we send straight down the shower drain, without even trying to recapture some of that heat? All of it? Fluorescent lighting is okay, but why don't we employ more skylights? And so on.
Seems the business world has taken networking in a client/server direction. I see a lot of web and network programming that does not need to be done in a client/server model, but is done that way for the sake of convenience and control. It was the client/server model that proved to be Napster's downfall. The Pirate Bay is better distributed, but still possesses that single point of failure. Bit Torrent is peer to peer, except for discovery which is handled by sites like Pirate Bay. Why do users have to log in to use Skype? Skype has centralized critical parts of communication so that even though it can be peer to peer once connected, the server is necessary to authenticate the users and make the connections. Email and instant messaging has evolved in the same direction. Run your own mail server, or take the easy way and let Google, Yahoo, MS, and friends scan your emails?
Most MMO games are also centralized, and this seems necessary to police the players, stop bad players from spoiling the fun. But is that really necessary? More like, no one has received funding to try to make a distributed decentralized system that can enforce a minimal set of rules necessary for a community to function. There seems no money in it. The typical game company likes to keep a tight grip on the kill switches, to force those monthy payments out of their users. In recent years, they've experimented with free accounts, but they still have their tight grip and can take their game down at will, or spitefully see it go down as part of their implicit suicide murder pact. Steam goes further, turning what was an offline gaming experience into one in which they are the gatekeepers. Your purchases, accomplishments, and accounts shall not survive the demise of the company! Be a real shame if they went out of business, hint hint.
That's not culture, that's slavery and jungle law! Don't buy into that culture B.S. when they're telling you right out that they will force you to work long hours, adopt their positions on politics, and look after your health their way. As to the competitive environment, you are interviewing for a job, not a chance to compete in a dog fight. The key distinction is do the managers live the way the workers live? If no, then the peons aren't a part of their culture.
Stupidity isn't so easily escaped, as it's everywhere. In many ways, running away just makes things worse. For your own sake, you need a place where you can breathe freely, but a permanent absence isn't so good. The absence of critical thinkers makes it easier for these Bible thumpers to turn state institutions into echo chambers.
Texas has had more than its share of outbreaks, from the Branch Davidians to the Yearning for Zion polygamists. The Republican party still seems bent on trying to manipulate and use stupid people. And as part of this, trying not to educate the people in certain ways, to keep them stupid and easier to manipulate. The pro-business wing of the party, the part that opted for this path, has been learning what happens when they too closely embrace such cynical disinformation campaigns. They've created a lot of confusion about what science is, leading many people to think scientists are just another political or religious group who engage in propaganda just like everyone else. When it's suggested that Global Warming is just self-interested propaganda, these people eat it up. "Doubt is our product" was a damn fool thing for business to do. Now they're losing their grip to the kinds of people who've embraced ignorance for purposes far beyond anything the business wing intended. They have so far managed to keep the really crazy candidates from winning the nomination for President, but have had less success in lesser races from Senate seats on down.
Texas may yet swing to the Democrats. It's not as solidly red as it appears. Right now, the Republican primary for district 11 of the Texas State Board of Education has a challenger, Ms. Thombs, who makes much of Obama evidently wanting to teach Islamic values to the children. Thombs and the Republican incumbent are apparently too lame to have working websites, but the other candidates have at least minimal sites: Eric Mahroum and Nancy Bean.
Anything that has parentheses-matching as a requirement is simply self-flagellation.
That's what the backronym says: Lots of Idiotic Single Parentheses.
Hierarchic thinking has infested Computer Science for decades. The entire Object Oriented Programming paradigm was founded on hierarchy, with Inheritance defined as from one parent only, and many not too sure if multiple inheritance is a good idea or needed. That the notion of inheritance even has to be qualified with that word "multiple", because it implicitly means single otherwise, is a barrier to thought. Trees are useful data structures, but they aren't the ultimate, universal data structure that can succinctly describe all other organizations of data.
You've surely heard this before, but let's go over it again. Patents are only one means of maybe making money off an invention. They don't work very well. Indeed, many companies choose to keep crucial insights secret, rather than trust to the patent system. That's one reason why so many patents are for trivial and obvious things. They know there's no use keeping the trivial and obvious secret. Instead, they rush to file patents on the trivial and obvious, before someone else does. Most of all, there are many other ways to profit from invention. There is the first mover advantage. There is making the world a better place, which benefits all, including the inventors. The mercenary view of human nature, that no one does anything for free, and that it is of no possible benefit to give and get nothing in return and therefore irrational to be "nice", is not only harsh and shallow, but not at all realistic and quite wrong. Nice guys don't finish last, and can and often do reap benefits from being nice. Then there are many forms of patronage. There are awards, grants, and prizes. There is advertising and endorsements. If patents were abolished, people would keep right on inventing, and profiting from their inventions. If we feel more incentive is needed, we can easily expand public patronage. Doesn't have to be government run either, such organizations can be private. Kickstarter and Indiegogo are private.
Patents are suppose to encourage progress, but they have far too often had the opposite effect. They are deliberately used to lock technology away, out of fear and greed. They provoke our worst impulses, leading inventors to think they own ideas that are the work of many, and get to control everything related to it out of a nutty notion that they deserve a cut of every way in which an invention increases profit or savings, and this control is the best way to insure they get what they deserve no matter how much that impacts 3rd parties who have nothing to do with any agreements made or disputes that may arise.
Remember that the courts actually proposed shutting the Blackberry network down, to make up for the supposed harm a patent troll suffered, failing to appreciate the harm this would cause the innocent customers who used it. And remember that SCO actually demanded that Linux users pay them licensing fees, when any such fees, if owed at all, should have come from the actual-- actual, not "theoretical"-- profits of the creators and distributors of Linux, not the users. What the actions of the likes of SCO were saying is not only that patents were wanted, they weren't good enough and needed to be stronger! A remedy like that is like proposing to tow every car in the neighborhood because one of the residents was accused of speeding. Also remember how patents have been abused to cover up problems, as in the case of Dmitry Sklyarov and many others, and to squelch honest compeition as in many cases including one about garage door openers. It's incredible that DRM is still as lively as it is, since it plain does not work, and it's the fault of bad lawmaking including patent law that DRM hangs on to life. It's time patents were ended. They do a lot of bad things, and what little good they do is doubtful at best. They cost us a great deal of money to enforce and argue about in court. If not abolished, then they should at least not come with monopoly grants enforced at great taxpayer expense. Reform would help, but the better direction to take is abolishment. We'll never be free of legal harassment and interference in genuinely new research for so long as these tools exist.
Aren't there any solutions posted anywhere? This is a good exercise if you want to spend time puzzling out the more arcane features of regular expression evaluators. Some of these aren't fully working solutions.
Abba is better as a negation of (.)(.)\2\1 , but I couldn't quickly figure out how to do it. Triples looks like it's supposed to make use of an old math trick to tell if a number is divisible by 3. Just add all the digits together to get another number. Repeat on the new number until a single digit is left, and if that digit is 0,3,6, or 9, then the number is divisble by 3. Will take me too much time to figure out how to program that into a regular expression. I cheated on Glob. Obviously it's supposed to sort the full matches from the partial matches. Balance is one of those exercises in being contrary, making a tool do what everyone says it's not meant to do. Just copied the matching string for the 2 Long count puzzles. 3012 points.
For me, Google blew it when they forcefully merged my gmail and youtube accounts. I've cut back on gmail as much as I can conveniently. But I still use it.
It's hard to leave when you don't have a place to go. I used to have a nice tree of email addresses, and used them to keep email sorted between business and personal, and such like. Then most of the free email providers ended their services, and now I'm down to gmail. yahoo, and hotmail. Oh, and bigfoot still sort of works. If you call frequent delays of more than 8 hours working. (Made it difficult to reset a password on a site that sent out password reset tokens that expired in 6 hours.) Anyway, bigfoot isn't a full blown email service, it's only a redirector.
I could run my own private little email server, but have been reluctant to do so. Apart from the sysadmin work, I'd have to deal with spam somehow. And as I'm using a free Dyndns name, there's no assurance my email address would be stable. (Paying doesn't do much more to assure permanence. Dyndns could always go out of business, or be bought and merged.) I used to have a "homeip.net" name, until Dyndns changed policies and killed half their free names. Now it's "dyndns.info". Guess I can live with that. Just don't force me into godaddy.
At least there is now duckduckgo for search engines. I don't use Google's search much anymore. But what alternatives are there for email these days? Apart from yahoo and hotmail, that is?
Much of this sounds familiar. Fine grained rights on file handles sounds awfully like SELinux, which is itself merely an implementation of access control. Though it sounds like Capiscum has left it up to the app to decide what rights it needs, whereas SELinux maintains a big file of extended rights, basically a big extension to the old UNIX security model of "rwx" for owner, group, and world. Last time I tried SELinux, many years ago, I found I was always having to expand privileges so that utilities and apps could do their jobs. The extra system administration work that required was far too burdensome, and so SELinux went largely unused. We finally said the heck with it, and gave pretty much every permission to every program.
Maybe Capiscum is better, but it doesn't sound too secure, leaving it up to the app to police itself. We've seen how well that didn't work in places like Wall Street. Is Capiscum's real security the sandboxing?
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But there are many science and engineering jobs with poor pay. Pay for postdocs is low, and shamefully low for grad students taking on teaching fellowships. Internships are another. New or near grads who may already be burdened with massive student loan debt are sold a bill of goods, told that part of their pay is the "valuable" experience they gain, and this justifies paying them a pittance, or even nothing at all-- the infamous unpaid internship.
And if that isn't enough, what about employers who cheat their regular employees, not just the poor interns? One of the biggest problems with joining some small edgy startup, being mesmerized with the potential, suckered into dreams of great success, wealth, and fame, is that the odds of success are much poorer than they want to believe or admit. The finance folks tend to keep the engineers in the dark about the company's finances, until they can't make payroll. They borrow their engineer's time, knowing full well that if sales continue at the same level this month as in the previous 6 plus months, they will not be able to pay, but wishfully hoping that this month will be different. So the poor engineer wasn't told, and doesn't find out until they've taken a month of work that they can't pay for. Indeed management tends to view engineers as chumps too dumb and narrow to see the larger picture, and also as arrogant about their intelligence, so why not take them to the cleaners and get a little kick out of putting one over on those smarty pants? Helps soothe the sting of failure to screw over a bunch of arrogant engineers they've been jealous of since grade school math class. Then they usually have the cheek to say that the situation will surely improve shortly, the corner will be turned any day now, and ask that the engineers now volunteer further time and effort for free, to be paid back later only if the company succeeds of course. Show your commitment and passion, yeah!
The 1099 can be another way to cheat the engineer. The engineer is once again suckered with visions of glorious independence and freedom while the "contractee" (*cough* employer *cough*) gets out of all kinds of pesky labor regulations and overhead pay like contributing to unemployment and retirement funds.
There are some head hunting agencies that are positively predatory. One that I recall insisted that job seekers sign a contract that stated that the employer will pay the agency 1/3 of the new employee's first year of pay, and that if the employer fails to pay this money, then the employee is on the hook for it! I had visions of this being turned into a little scam. Get hired by an employer in cahoots with the agency and who never intended to keep you but instead plans to come up with an excuse to fire you in 91 days. Earn 3 months of pay, owe 4 months of pay. Profit!
And where is the government while employees are being fleeced? In the employers' corner, having been bought off with generous campaign donations. Might even send the police in to do some union busting.
Not at all silly. Recording equipment always filters and misses some data before it ever reaches a storage device. An audio CD may be a downsampled version. A lossless format like FLAC can't help with that. Main reason to use FLAC is for editing. If all one means to do with the audio is listen, why not be intelligent about what to toss, and save a lot more space?
And it's a lot more fun than MS vs Linux, Java vs .NET, Nvidia vs AMD, or even vi vs emacs. Sorry "gcc or llvm", your grudge match will have to settle for a 3 AM slot on a low budget, obscure science light cable TV channel.
The big language demolition derby is still hot and furious, like the annual playoffs of old sports that still excite fans, if you can see past all the smoking wrecks like Modula and the entire team of modular programming cluttering the arena. If only the Perl 6 team could sort out their engine troubles and get their car into the arena, replace that sputtering Perl 5 vehicle and challenge that JavaScript/CSS/HTML/AJAX monstrousity that was cobbled together from a dozen different brands of automobiles, and that C++ bug that still works after being run over and rolled over and which just got a fresh set of wheels. OOP sponsors must be wondering which teams are still proud to bear their logos. And where's Haskell? Oh yes, loudly honking their horns from atop the safety of their functional programming pedestal while the LISP car circles round and round as if they expect a ramp to appear at any moment. Python? Dancing around the LAMP pole with PHP's go-kart. In one of the darker corners of the arena are the excruciatingly slow horse drawn wagons of the Fortran and Cobol teams, just trying to hold their ground. Follow the oil slick to find C. Java is struggling to move under the crushing weight of their massive armor, spare parts, and the huge gas tanks needed to feed their too thirsty engine. The kids would still love those Logo toy cars they used to hand out last century.
If coding is so universal, what language should everyone learn? We're nowhere near sorting that out. Shouldn't we be able to settle and standardize on the essential elements of a programming language? As it is, it's like arguments over mathematical notation. Multiplication works the same whether the symbol used is x or * or a dot or nothing at all because it's the default operation. But it's not so easy to tell what is trivial and what is important in programming languages.
Guess the world shouldn't have thrown Word Perfect under the bus?
Or, how about Word Star? There was a time when its editing keystrokes were widely adopted, like in Borland's integrated development environments.
Or, why not use LaTeX? Admittedly, it's a bit of a learning curve, but you can just bang out text, and worry about formatting later, even change it around relatively easily.
It should be legal to copy music. Artists can be compensated, with money, in many other ways. Don't have to put tolls and restrictions on the copying of information, in order to fairly compensate artists.
Educating our enemies might enlighten them so that they are no longer our enemies. Sure would be a lot cheaper that way than starting another war, you know, like in Iraq, over Weapons of Mass Destruction that didn't exist.
We should better educate ourselves. Too much of what passes for education in the US and the West is indoctrination. Read some Noam Chomsky and A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn for a bit of perspective.
It always amazes me how many very narrowly educated people there are. I used to think a Bachelor of Arts degree was a watered down, wimpy sort of college degree and the Bachelor of Science was the way to go. Now, after encountering quite a few people who know technical stuff like how to be a good code monkey but are utterly ignorant of philosophy and the basics of science and rational thought, I wonder if an Arts degree was meant to deal with precisely that problem. Every person with a college degree should be equipped to understand that, for example, Creationism is bunk.
I agree. Recompiling is not a big deal. C/C++ is standardized. The heavy lifting is the creation of standard libraries, and any sensible chip and system vendor will help do that because it's absolutely necessary. This is not the same thing as porting from an Oracle database to MariaDB or some other DB. That's a big job because every database has their own unique set of extensions to SQL.
x86 never was a good architecture. It was crap when it was created back in the 1970s, crap even when compared to other CISC architectures of that era, and despite tremendous improvement, it's still crap today. Motorola's 68000 series was superior. Intel went with a load/store design for the integer math, which is okay, but then for no good reason whatsoever they didn't stay consistent for the floating point math, opting for a horrible stack based approach. The reason the true underlying architecture of a modern x86 CPU is RISC is that RISC is just that much better. Yes, so much better that even after allowing for the overhead in translating from x86 to RISC instructions, it is still faster than a CPU that executes x86 operations natively. They've done an amazing job of working around and amending the shortcomings of the x86 design, but it would be better to ditch the legacy cruft and make a fresh start. I mean, the instruction set has specialized instructions for handling packed decimal! And then there's the near worthless string search REPNE CMPSB family of instructions. The Boyer-Moore string search algorithm is much faster, and dates back to 1977. Another sad thing is that for some CPUs, the built in DIV instruction was so slow that sometimes it was faster to do integer division with shifts and subtracts. That's a serious knock on Intel that they did such a poor job of implementing DIV. A long time criticism of the x86 architecture has been that it has too few registers, and what it does have is much too specialized. Like, only AX and DX can be used for integer multiplication and division. And BX is for indexing, and CX is for looping (B is for base and C is for count you know-- it's like the designers took their inspiration from Sesame Street's Cookie Monster and the Count!) This forces a lot of juggling to move data in and out of the few registers that can do the desired operation. This particular problem has been much alleviated by the addition of more registers and shadow registers, but that doesn't address the numerous other problems. Yet another feature that is obsolete is the CALL and RET and of course the PUSH and POP instructions, because once again they used a stack. Standard thinking 40 years ago, but today, we know that more flexibility is better, and calls and returns can be achieved with a JMP instruction that stores a return address at a location determined through some indirection, rather than using a specialized CALL and RET instruction that pigs out on a precious register to hold and update a stack pointer for a call stack, and which is a pain to work around to implement things like tail end recursion. Finally, the support for task switching, virtual memory, and concurrency was lacking. Their so-called segmented memory architecture was terrible. The first attempt at OS level instructions, in the 80286, was so badly done that hardly anyone tried to use it. The 80386 was much better, but still lacked an atomic instruction for handling semaphores. Wasn't until the 80486 that they finally got it good enough to support a real OS. That's a big reason why PCs had such a poor reputation compared to Big Iron, and were often dismissed as toys.
That's not to say that ARM and other architectures don't have issues. But the x86-- it's like they were trying for the worst possible design they could think of.
simply abolishing all forms of IP protection is probably not a viable option
I think that abolishment is a viable option. Money can compensate people for revealing trade secrets. Don't have to give them a monopoly in order to give them money. The details of just how that should be done will need much hashing out, but it's doable, and being done by the likes of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, Monopoly protection on ideas has always been bad for innovation, and expensive, difficult, and problematical to enforce. It's only in recent times that this has become painfully obvious.
Someday, the exclamation "you stole my idea!" will sound utterly quaint and ridiculous, like accusing someone of using witchcraft to cause your cow or goat to sicken and die sounds today. Future generations will be glad that whatever else is good or bad about current times, they didn't live in the dark ages of intellectual property laws, when "making available" a mere 24 songs could trigger a witchhunt and a financial crucifixion.
Support for Ogg Vorbis is still hard to find. Some years ago, MS went to war in the US against Vorbis. The courts slapped MS down, but the effects still linger. On one mp3 player, to get the ability to play Vorbis, I had to download a European ROM for it, then trick its flash program into loading it since the program was coded to check which edition was already installed, and then refuse to update to any other edition than what it found. On another, had to install Rockbox. Car radios are still very lacking in support for Ogg Vorbis. Only practical way to get it is to make sure the radio has an audio input jack, and plug in the portable music player of your choice. For that matter way too may car radios still come with CD players. Who wants CDs anymore?
There's a new audio format, Opus. PC software is still catching up with that one.
Exactly. Science makes statements about the natural world. The supernatural is not something that can be tested.
To wit, an omnipotent being could have created the Earth and the whole universe 10 years ago, or 10 minutes ago, complete with people who have implanted memories of things that happened 20 plus years ago, and tons of evidence that make it look like the Earth is billions of years old. How can we tell the difference? How can we tell whether the Earth was created by some omnipotent being 100 or 6000 years ago, or any other number of years ago? We can't! There is no way to test supernatural notions. Does that make science worthless? Not at all. We knowingly operate with the provision that what we observe is in fact reality. It seems some people find it extremely disappointing that science cannot provide absolute answers to every question with no doubt whatsoever, and react by unfairly dismissing everything scientific methods have to say. They want Answers, and they don't understand or care they're asking too much of science.
Our observations of many different factors all point to the Earth being about 4.5 billion years old. Radioactive decay of many different elements all point to that same age. The ratio of hydrogen to helium and heavier elements in the Sun gives similar ages. A statistical analysis of the numbers of craters also points to great age. We are absolutely surrounded by geological features that could have come about through millions of years of natural processes such as erosion, but not mere thousands.
The GP needs a primer on philosophy.
Lie, even perjure, and bankrupt thousands of home buyers, and get away with it. Because they're rich and powerful. Like the Queen of Mean said, "only the little people pay taxes" and, evidently, the consequences.
One thing that strikes me about all these high profile criminal and civil cases in the financial world is the supreme emphasis placed on not admitting any fault or guilt. They pay a fine, but they don't admit guilt. The explanation is, it seems, that admitting guilt would leave them vulnerable to all kinds of investor lawsuits. This deal being offered to Snowden, in which he starts by admitting guilt, doesn't sound like any deal at all. I think he'd be crazy to accept it. And maybe he shouldn't even negotiate, until US enforcers get serious about making a somewhat reasonable inital offer. An offer that includes admitting guilt smells bad, like they're just playing games with him, testing him to see if he's desperate or stupid or having a mental lapse.
Another thing to think about is how the law treated Aaron Swartz. Threaten him with extreme consequences in order to bully him into making a plea bargain. Prosecutors score a few points for being tough on crime, and Swartz spends a few months in prison, with the option to be held for much, much longer, because, hey, in that scenario he admitted guilt. Instead, Swartz took their extreme threats to heart, and suicided. It was a rotten deal anyway.
But the Commodore 64 disk drive... man, that thing was epic slow.
ATI/AMD promised decent performing open source drivers years ago. I would like to have seen this promise fulfilled much sooner. This is progress, but still not all they promised. Couple of years, sigh.
So I've bought in each camp. My 3 most recent computers--2 of which aren't very recent any more-- are an Intel CPU with Nvidia (a fanless GT 610, upgraded from the original 8500GT when the fan went bad), an AMD CPU with Radeon (HD 5400), and the newest is an Intel CPU with Intel's much improved HD line of integrated graphics (HD 4000). It's all low end graphics, just barely good enough to handle high end games at slow framerates and/or small resolutions. I'm more interested in low power, low noise, and reliability. I'm still waiting for a vendor to have high performance and quality open source offerings. Such a thing would inspire me to get a new desktop sooner.
How about using the law to prevent others from reverse engineering a product? Or jailing someone for investigating the security of a product, like what happened to Dmitry Sklyarov? That's not freedom, that's power no one should have, because it is too easy to abuse, and is abused. The DMCA takedown provision is routinely abused to hinder and silence perfectly legitimate competitors and critics. Many legitimate videos have been taken down from Youtube on the mere accusation of infringement, without any proof or due process, and some of it by robots sloppily programmed to do minimal checking and to presume guilt. The burden of proof is then upon the poster to prove innocence, rather than the accuser to prove guilt. And this is justified because "everyone is a pirate".
The "freedom" to keep others in the dark is too easy to abuse. It doesn't stop with being used only to protect "trade secrets". It has been used to hide problems, and deny responsibility for causing damages. And to unfairly burden others with all the work to clear their names, without even a clear accusation of such things as exactly what patents or copyrights have been infringed. And to disguise blatantly lying propaganda campaigns as science, fact, or truth.
All that is forcing others not to do what you don't like. When it is cheaper to cover up a problem by depriving others of freedom, causing them undue hardship and placing unreasonable burdens on them, which way do too many businesses choose to go, if they have the "freedom" of such options, backed up by government bullying? Yeah. That's censorship. That's shooting the messenger for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Even worse is the trolling, in which businesses arise solely for purposes of exploiting these hugely overreaching laws to blackmail others into paying them protection fees. The big players in the music and movie industry have all made the choice to accuse the entire world of piracy, and because we gave them the freedom to run roughshod over our rights so that they don't have to change and adapt the way the rest of us have to, they have stuck to their position no matter how crazy and wild the outcomes have become. Who still really thinks that Jammie Thomas should be penalized $1.92 million for sharing 24 songs online? Does anyone think every Linux user in the world should each pay SCO a $700 licensing fee? No one thinks that the world owes Big Entertainment $75 trillion. No one is fooled for long by ridiculous propaganda like Captain Copyright.
Freedom is not an absolute. Your freedoms end where others' begin. You are not free to enslave people, deny education to women as the Taliban wants to do, recklessly endanger property and lives, litter, trespass, and so on.
In this case, should vendors have the "freedom" to keep customers and users in the dark? That's why we still don't have good open source drivers for some vendors' products. Nice DRM is no better than nice slavery.
Giving up our natural right and ability to share knowledge with one another is far too high a price to pay in order to restrict transfers of knowledge to approved pay channels. If we did that, we might as well abandon democracy, as one of its requirements, public education, is a huge sharing of knowledge that is being done to the detriment of commercial interests' opportunity to profit. The money they make off of textbooks in no way matches the value of an education. Children should pay more, and should be taught not to steal! The alphabet itself is a subversive tool that allows people to write letters and steal from phone companies!
A home can do way better than 1000 kWh/month. Half the energy we use goes towards heating and cooling. In months when the temperature is mild and neither heating nor cooling is needed, we use only 300 kHw for a 4 bedroom home, and there is still room for improvement. It's not only possible to build a house that doesn't need much heating and cooling, it isn't even particularly hard or expensive. We had a home built in 1969 that without using the furnace could maintain 60F in the day in winter in the northern US thanks to a large window area on the southern side. (We know, because sometimes a blizzard would knock out the power for a few days.) A little more efficiency, and the home could have done without a furnace at all. Appliances are still improving. Our homes and lifestyles are incredibly stupidly wasteful, and there is a lot of low hanging fruit we could harvest if only we would.
How many of us are forced to drive to work for a job that could be done remotely? Why do we have to drive in? Because management thinks we're all lazy bums who will goof off if no one is standing over us with a sharp prod. And because the designs of our newer cities neglected to plan for any other mode of transport so that riding a bike or walking is suicidally dangerous. Why do we use clothes dryers? Because we've bought the idea that racks are too slow or take too much space, or are symbolic of a lowly impoverished status? How much hot water do we send straight down the shower drain, without even trying to recapture some of that heat? All of it? Fluorescent lighting is okay, but why don't we employ more skylights? And so on.
Find and learn peer to peer tech. Or make it.
Seems the business world has taken networking in a client/server direction. I see a lot of web and network programming that does not need to be done in a client/server model, but is done that way for the sake of convenience and control. It was the client/server model that proved to be Napster's downfall. The Pirate Bay is better distributed, but still possesses that single point of failure. Bit Torrent is peer to peer, except for discovery which is handled by sites like Pirate Bay. Why do users have to log in to use Skype? Skype has centralized critical parts of communication so that even though it can be peer to peer once connected, the server is necessary to authenticate the users and make the connections. Email and instant messaging has evolved in the same direction. Run your own mail server, or take the easy way and let Google, Yahoo, MS, and friends scan your emails?
Most MMO games are also centralized, and this seems necessary to police the players, stop bad players from spoiling the fun. But is that really necessary? More like, no one has received funding to try to make a distributed decentralized system that can enforce a minimal set of rules necessary for a community to function. There seems no money in it. The typical game company likes to keep a tight grip on the kill switches, to force those monthy payments out of their users. In recent years, they've experimented with free accounts, but they still have their tight grip and can take their game down at will, or spitefully see it go down as part of their implicit suicide murder pact. Steam goes further, turning what was an offline gaming experience into one in which they are the gatekeepers. Your purchases, accomplishments, and accounts shall not survive the demise of the company! Be a real shame if they went out of business, hint hint.
Your logic is flawed. You say an animal is an animal, and there's no difference between slaughtering a dolphin and a fish.
There's a world of difference in breeding rates. Dolphins don't breed quickly. Gestation takes longer than it does for humans.
These fishermen are idiots. They think they can kill all the dolphins they can catch, and nature will make more.
That's not culture, that's slavery and jungle law! Don't buy into that culture B.S. when they're telling you right out that they will force you to work long hours, adopt their positions on politics, and look after your health their way. As to the competitive environment, you are interviewing for a job, not a chance to compete in a dog fight. The key distinction is do the managers live the way the workers live? If no, then the peons aren't a part of their culture.
Stupidity isn't so easily escaped, as it's everywhere. In many ways, running away just makes things worse. For your own sake, you need a place where you can breathe freely, but a permanent absence isn't so good. The absence of critical thinkers makes it easier for these Bible thumpers to turn state institutions into echo chambers.
Texas has had more than its share of outbreaks, from the Branch Davidians to the Yearning for Zion polygamists. The Republican party still seems bent on trying to manipulate and use stupid people. And as part of this, trying not to educate the people in certain ways, to keep them stupid and easier to manipulate. The pro-business wing of the party, the part that opted for this path, has been learning what happens when they too closely embrace such cynical disinformation campaigns. They've created a lot of confusion about what science is, leading many people to think scientists are just another political or religious group who engage in propaganda just like everyone else. When it's suggested that Global Warming is just self-interested propaganda, these people eat it up. "Doubt is our product" was a damn fool thing for business to do. Now they're losing their grip to the kinds of people who've embraced ignorance for purposes far beyond anything the business wing intended. They have so far managed to keep the really crazy candidates from winning the nomination for President, but have had less success in lesser races from Senate seats on down.
Texas may yet swing to the Democrats. It's not as solidly red as it appears. Right now, the Republican primary for district 11 of the Texas State Board of Education has a challenger, Ms. Thombs, who makes much of Obama evidently wanting to teach Islamic values to the children. Thombs and the Republican incumbent are apparently too lame to have working websites, but the other candidates have at least minimal sites: Eric Mahroum and Nancy Bean.
Anything that has parentheses-matching as a requirement is simply self-flagellation.
That's what the backronym says: Lots of Idiotic Single Parentheses.
Hierarchic thinking has infested Computer Science for decades. The entire Object Oriented Programming paradigm was founded on hierarchy, with Inheritance defined as from one parent only, and many not too sure if multiple inheritance is a good idea or needed. That the notion of inheritance even has to be qualified with that word "multiple", because it implicitly means single otherwise, is a barrier to thought. Trees are useful data structures, but they aren't the ultimate, universal data structure that can succinctly describe all other organizations of data.
But where's the incentive
You've surely heard this before, but let's go over it again. Patents are only one means of maybe making money off an invention. They don't work very well. Indeed, many companies choose to keep crucial insights secret, rather than trust to the patent system. That's one reason why so many patents are for trivial and obvious things. They know there's no use keeping the trivial and obvious secret. Instead, they rush to file patents on the trivial and obvious, before someone else does. Most of all, there are many other ways to profit from invention. There is the first mover advantage. There is making the world a better place, which benefits all, including the inventors. The mercenary view of human nature, that no one does anything for free, and that it is of no possible benefit to give and get nothing in return and therefore irrational to be "nice", is not only harsh and shallow, but not at all realistic and quite wrong. Nice guys don't finish last, and can and often do reap benefits from being nice. Then there are many forms of patronage. There are awards, grants, and prizes. There is advertising and endorsements. If patents were abolished, people would keep right on inventing, and profiting from their inventions. If we feel more incentive is needed, we can easily expand public patronage. Doesn't have to be government run either, such organizations can be private. Kickstarter and Indiegogo are private.
Patents are suppose to encourage progress, but they have far too often had the opposite effect. They are deliberately used to lock technology away, out of fear and greed. They provoke our worst impulses, leading inventors to think they own ideas that are the work of many, and get to control everything related to it out of a nutty notion that they deserve a cut of every way in which an invention increases profit or savings, and this control is the best way to insure they get what they deserve no matter how much that impacts 3rd parties who have nothing to do with any agreements made or disputes that may arise.
Remember that the courts actually proposed shutting the Blackberry network down, to make up for the supposed harm a patent troll suffered, failing to appreciate the harm this would cause the innocent customers who used it. And remember that SCO actually demanded that Linux users pay them licensing fees, when any such fees, if owed at all, should have come from the actual-- actual, not "theoretical"-- profits of the creators and distributors of Linux, not the users. What the actions of the likes of SCO were saying is not only that patents were wanted, they weren't good enough and needed to be stronger! A remedy like that is like proposing to tow every car in the neighborhood because one of the residents was accused of speeding. Also remember how patents have been abused to cover up problems, as in the case of Dmitry Sklyarov and many others, and to squelch honest compeition as in many cases including one about garage door openers. It's incredible that DRM is still as lively as it is, since it plain does not work, and it's the fault of bad lawmaking including patent law that DRM hangs on to life. It's time patents were ended. They do a lot of bad things, and what little good they do is doubtful at best. They cost us a great deal of money to enforce and argue about in court. If not abolished, then they should at least not come with monopoly grants enforced at great taxpayer expense. Reform would help, but the better direction to take is abolishment. We'll never be free of legal harassment and interference in genuinely new research for so long as these tools exist.
Aren't there any solutions posted anywhere? This is a good exercise if you want to spend time puzzling out the more arcane features of regular expression evaluators. Some of these aren't fully working solutions.
Abba is better as a negation of (.)(.)\2\1 , but I couldn't quickly figure out how to do it. Triples looks like it's supposed to make use of an old math trick to tell if a number is divisible by 3. Just add all the digits together to get another number. Repeat on the new number until a single digit is left, and if that digit is 0,3,6, or 9, then the number is divisble by 3. Will take me too much time to figure out how to program that into a regular expression. I cheated on Glob. Obviously it's supposed to sort the full matches from the partial matches. Balance is one of those exercises in being contrary, making a tool do what everyone says it's not meant to do. Just copied the matching string for the 2 Long count puzzles. 3012 points.
For me, Google blew it when they forcefully merged my gmail and youtube accounts. I've cut back on gmail as much as I can conveniently. But I still use it.
It's hard to leave when you don't have a place to go. I used to have a nice tree of email addresses, and used them to keep email sorted between business and personal, and such like. Then most of the free email providers ended their services, and now I'm down to gmail. yahoo, and hotmail. Oh, and bigfoot still sort of works. If you call frequent delays of more than 8 hours working. (Made it difficult to reset a password on a site that sent out password reset tokens that expired in 6 hours.) Anyway, bigfoot isn't a full blown email service, it's only a redirector.
I could run my own private little email server, but have been reluctant to do so. Apart from the sysadmin work, I'd have to deal with spam somehow. And as I'm using a free Dyndns name, there's no assurance my email address would be stable. (Paying doesn't do much more to assure permanence. Dyndns could always go out of business, or be bought and merged.) I used to have a "homeip.net" name, until Dyndns changed policies and killed half their free names. Now it's "dyndns.info". Guess I can live with that. Just don't force me into godaddy.
At least there is now duckduckgo for search engines. I don't use Google's search much anymore. But what alternatives are there for email these days? Apart from yahoo and hotmail, that is?
Much of this sounds familiar. Fine grained rights on file handles sounds awfully like SELinux, which is itself merely an implementation of access control. Though it sounds like Capiscum has left it up to the app to decide what rights it needs, whereas SELinux maintains a big file of extended rights, basically a big extension to the old UNIX security model of "rwx" for owner, group, and world. Last time I tried SELinux, many years ago, I found I was always having to expand privileges so that utilities and apps could do their jobs. The extra system administration work that required was far too burdensome, and so SELinux went largely unused. We finally said the heck with it, and gave pretty much every permission to every program.
Maybe Capiscum is better, but it doesn't sound too secure, leaving it up to the app to police itself. We've seen how well that didn't work in places like Wall Street. Is Capiscum's real security the sandboxing?