I don't know where the poster of the parent comment got his exact figures, but they are reasonable in light of most of what I've read about population cycles.
There is a well established trend in human societies (See "Conquests and Cultures: An International History" by Thomas Sowell or search online for population trends analysis) where populations go through a cycle of:
subsistance/hunter/gatherer society - low population due to not enough food to go around.
farming/manual labor society - population explosion because the more people you have, the more wealth you can create for your family.
modern technology - population decrease as having more kids costs as much or more than their raw labor is worth, making it more important to have better trained/smarter kids.
future society - ? We're not there yet, so who knows.
Many parts of the world are currently still relying on manual labor methods that encourage increased population to create wealth. However, as nations/regions have moved to a technological and industrial level where that is no longer necessary their population has slowly dropped off.
High technology/highly industrialized nations like the United States have for years had to rely on immigrants to make up for their decreasing "natural-born" population. Western Europe is currently facing a crisis of of having too small of a working (younger) class to support their retired class' welfare because they currently have a much harder time attracting permanent and working immigrants than the US does.
As nations that currently expand their populations improve their level of wealth and technology, their population growth levels off and then turns negative. No one knows what future society will bring as technology advances, but it is likely that the population level that the world "stabalizes" at will be significantly smaller then its current level. At that point we will have to worry about making sure people have enough children to at least replace themselves.
To bring this back to the original topic, it may take new frontiers such as developing the Moon and farther out in space to trigger enough population growth to keep the human race genetically viable. With the high-danger rates in frontier areas, historically their birth-rate has also been higher than replacement-value.
I'd bring up our 245 Mb/s pipe here at work that the 7 of us share (with a GigE "backup" connection to UUnet), but then someone who works at UUnet/Verio/etc... would just post a follow-up... so instead, I'll ask if you've established your actual connection speed to the server linked to?
That 12Mbit is pointless if the other end only has a T-1.
Problem is I want to travel farther than 4 blocks... I suppose I could throw an Athlon into a case and plug it into my DC to AC converter in the car and take it with me... hmmm, maybe the local government will give me a grant to study it as a replacement for snow-plowing!
Seriously, I actually took the time to dig out the six foot pile of snow the plow left behind my car and drive 3 blocks to drop my brother off and so now I can get around, although most longer-distance travel is still iffy around here.
The Alpha cpus are nice. We're using four DS20's (dual 866 Mhz Alpha CPUs and 4 GB of RAM each) as Oracle 9i RAC database servers at work and they're great for that purpoase. We bought them to save about 1.5 Million on Oracle licenses before the Ultra Sparc III's came out. (Gotta love Oracle's by cpu doesn't matter what the speed licensing model!) Sadly, it looks like that after the Dec/Compaq/HP merger series, Alpha hardware is going the way of the unsupported.
Since I'm married with 2.5 kids (one on the way), I pretty much have an assured date anytime I want one... If I went hunting for new ones, I'm pretty sure it would cause local heat problems.:)
I'm sitting here looking out the window at 2 feet of snow keeping me inside and wishing that I didn't have my next computer upgrade delayed by AMD. I know I could pick up plenty of CPUs right now much faster than my 1.4 GHz Athlon, but I really wanted my next upgrade to be to their 64bit architecture. It's like when a 386 was the fastest intel chip out there, but the 486 was just around the corner.... I want to wait, but until September now?!?
Since I really don't have anything that actually requires an immediate upgrade (picking up another 1/2 GB of ram and a decent video card put that off for a while), I'll just keep waiting.
I want one (ok, two) for my house, but really, I do want inexpensive blade servers using the new Athlon MP chip to use as web/application servers first....
1. Notice caller-id on home phone shows unavailable or unrecognizable.
2. Answer with "Sharper Services Help line, only $150 an hour to answer any question you might have, 1/2 hour minimum." (My legitimate computer consulting company name, substitute yours and your normal phone support pricing.)
3. When they start talking, insist that they must provide a personal or company name before beginning their question.
4. Once that is provided, ask for the credit card number or company billing address before beginning their question.
Most will have hung up by at that point, but some are dumb enough to have provided a company name and address. The 1/2 hour minimum helps. At that point, answer their questions (usually no, I don't want to buy ___.) and then simply turn the bill over to accounting/collections.
If you don't want to go through the above or don't have the company infrastructure to get payment, at least offer to sell them something like having a stick in your yard named after them and insist that they hear about all its benefits before refusing your generous price.
1. Most current ssh implementations have an "ssh-dumy-shell" that is specifically designed to only allow an account to use sftp and not regular shell access. I'd look for that feature instead of just pointing the username to sftp itself.
2. Your shell isn't going to matter for stopping r* commands. What you do for that is to take the neccesary steps to disable them completely. They really have no place running in a modern OS that you are able to install replacements like ssh2 on. Remove rshd (any any other r* style daemon) from inetd.conf (or other similar startup scripts) and add unchangeable default files for/etc/hosts.deny,/etc/hosts.equiv,/etc/login.conf, $HOME/.rhosts and/var/run/nologin defined so that no one could use them if somehow rshd was run.
Typically, when government takes over a "problem" they tend to make it much worse. Traffic congestion? Roads are almost all owned by governments. Poverty? It was decreasing in the United States until the federal government decided to "do comething about it" with a war on poverty. At that point, it stopped decreasing. Pollution/environment? That pattern is duplicated in almost every other huge government "solution" to something. Governments have almost always been the worst and most massive polluters and enablers of pollution. Ever heard of a "private" nuclear reactor that laid waste to hundreds of square miles? Bet you could name a government run one that did. Post offices vs. the private Federal Express... the examples could go on for hours.
When something is privately owned there is incentive to make customers happy and preserve the asset (land, water, infrastructure, etc...). The people most concerned pay directly for the service. "Public" assets and "businesses" end up with a bunch of glorified clerks making decisions about things and being completely insulated from the effects. Try telling your local government clerk that you pay their salary with your taxes and you want better service. They'll laugh you out of the place. Do the same with a local business and the manager's or owner's response will likely be to thank you for providing them with feedback.
Contrast the service you get from any government utility/service with that of a private business. You'll find that the only poor service private businesses are those that are about to go under or have secured for themselves a special priviledge granted by the, you-guessed-it, government.
"Natural" total monopolies don't exist naturally. The "private" and public forms are created by those representatives you are so proud of having a vote for. Thank them for the service level of companies like SBC and Verizon. If utilities, etc... were really "natural" monopolies, then there would be no need for laws backed by force to protect them.
In a free scenario, as long as they provided good service and pricing, it wouldn't pay for anyone to pay the cost to compete with them, but let them get to the point where it takes months to provide (usually lousy) service and it wouldn't take long for someone to see the opportunity to replace them. It's the customers that lose when the government destroys the efficiency inherent in a price/market based situation. Perhaps you should invest in a good book on basic economics?
Typically the way most freely available genealogical databases handle privacy/security issues is to only make available information about the deceased. That prevents stealing live birthdates, connecting live people to their mother's maiden name, etc... If an identity thief knows enough to connect you with your dead ancestors, then they already know your mother's maiden name.
One thing missing from most services is a way to blind-contact living relatives that they have records for, but aren't listing. Usually when researching your own family, getting in touch with someone that is a relative of yours and already doing their genealogy can save you years of duplicate research.
In the past (at least in the US) you had to travel to central library locations to do research on microfilm. About 10-15 years ago they started storing cd-rom sets, but its only been recently that you could do records research all over the world from the comfort of your home via the internet.
Its not all done. There are huge projects underway around the world to digitize old records. Until they are more complete, eventually you get through what's been done and have to go back to the routine of visiting cemetary churches and small government archives to try and gather info.
Hopefully this application of privacy rules doesn't set back the millions of us that like to research our family history. Can you image being told you have to travel across the world and prove your identity and relationship before being allowed to access government records they could just stick on the internet for you? Sounds like a step backwards to me.
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There is a well established trend in human societies (See "Conquests and Cultures: An International History" by Thomas Sowell or search online for population trends analysis) where populations go through a cycle of:
subsistance/hunter/gatherer society - low population due to not enough food to go around.
farming/manual labor society - population explosion because the more people you have, the more wealth you can create for your family.
modern technology - population decrease as having more kids costs as much or more than their raw labor is worth, making it more important to have better trained/smarter kids.
future society - ? We're not there yet, so who knows.
Many parts of the world are currently still relying on manual labor methods that encourage increased population to create wealth. However, as nations/regions have moved to a technological and industrial level where that is no longer necessary their population has slowly dropped off.
High technology/highly industrialized nations like the United States have for years had to rely on immigrants to make up for their decreasing "natural-born" population. Western Europe is currently facing a crisis of of having too small of a working (younger) class to support their retired class' welfare because they currently have a much harder time attracting permanent and working immigrants than the US does.
As nations that currently expand their populations improve their level of wealth and technology, their population growth levels off and then turns negative. No one knows what future society will bring as technology advances, but it is likely that the population level that the world "stabalizes" at will be significantly smaller then its current level. At that point we will have to worry about making sure people have enough children to at least replace themselves.
To bring this back to the original topic, it may take new frontiers such as developing the Moon and farther out in space to trigger enough population growth to keep the human race genetically viable. With the high-danger rates in frontier areas, historically their birth-rate has also been higher than replacement-value.
That 12Mbit is pointless if the other end only has a T-1.
Seriously, I actually took the time to dig out the six foot pile of snow the plow left behind my car and drive 3 blocks to drop my brother off and so now I can get around, although most longer-distance travel is still iffy around here.
The Alpha cpus are nice. We're using four DS20's (dual 866 Mhz Alpha CPUs and 4 GB of RAM each) as Oracle 9i RAC database servers at work and they're great for that purpoase. We bought them to save about 1.5 Million on Oracle licenses before the Ultra Sparc III's came out. (Gotta love Oracle's by cpu doesn't matter what the speed licensing model!) Sadly, it looks like that after the Dec/Compaq/HP merger series, Alpha hardware is going the way of the unsupported.
Since I'm married with 2.5 kids (one on the way), I pretty much have an assured date anytime I want one... If I went hunting for new ones, I'm pretty sure it would cause local heat problems. :)
Since I really don't have anything that actually requires an immediate upgrade (picking up another 1/2 GB of ram and a decent video card put that off for a while), I'll just keep waiting.
I want one (ok, two) for my house, but really, I do want inexpensive blade servers using the new Athlon MP chip to use as web/application servers first....
1. Notice caller-id on home phone shows unavailable or unrecognizable.
2. Answer with "Sharper Services Help line, only $150 an hour to answer any question you might have, 1/2 hour minimum." (My legitimate computer consulting company name, substitute yours and your normal phone support pricing.)
3. When they start talking, insist that they must provide a personal or company name before beginning their question.
4. Once that is provided, ask for the credit card number or company billing address before beginning their question.
Most will have hung up by at that point, but some are dumb enough to have provided a company name and address. The 1/2 hour minimum helps. At that point, answer their questions (usually no, I don't want to buy ___.) and then simply turn the bill over to accounting/collections.
If you don't want to go through the above or don't have the company infrastructure to get payment, at least offer to sell them something like having a stick in your yard named after them and insist that they hear about all its benefits before refusing your generous price.
1. Most current ssh implementations have an "ssh-dumy-shell" that is specifically designed to only allow an account to use sftp and not regular shell access. I'd look for that feature instead of just pointing the username to sftp itself.
2. Your shell isn't going to matter for stopping r* commands. What you do for that is to take the neccesary steps to disable them completely. They really have no place running in a modern OS that you are able to install replacements like ssh2 on. Remove rshd (any any other r* style daemon) from inetd.conf (or other similar startup scripts) and add unchangeable default files for /etc/hosts.deny, /etc/hosts.equiv, /etc/login.conf, $HOME/.rhosts and /var/run/nologin defined so that no one could use them if somehow rshd was run.
When something is privately owned there is incentive to make customers happy and preserve the asset (land, water, infrastructure, etc...). The people most concerned pay directly for the service. "Public" assets and "businesses" end up with a bunch of glorified clerks making decisions about things and being completely insulated from the effects. Try telling your local government clerk that you pay their salary with your taxes and you want better service. They'll laugh you out of the place. Do the same with a local business and the manager's or owner's response will likely be to thank you for providing them with feedback.
Contrast the service you get from any government utility/service with that of a private business. You'll find that the only poor service private businesses are those that are about to go under or have secured for themselves a special priviledge granted by the, you-guessed-it, government.
"Natural" total monopolies don't exist naturally. The "private" and public forms are created by those representatives you are so proud of having a vote for. Thank them for the service level of companies like SBC and Verizon. If utilities, etc... were really "natural" monopolies, then there would be no need for laws backed by force to protect them.
In a free scenario, as long as they provided good service and pricing, it wouldn't pay for anyone to pay the cost to compete with them, but let them get to the point where it takes months to provide (usually lousy) service and it wouldn't take long for someone to see the opportunity to replace them. It's the customers that lose when the government destroys the efficiency inherent in a price/market based situation. Perhaps you should invest in a good book on basic economics?
One thing missing from most services is a way to blind-contact living relatives that they have records for, but aren't listing. Usually when researching your own family, getting in touch with someone that is a relative of yours and already doing their genealogy can save you years of duplicate research.
In the past (at least in the US) you had to travel to central library locations to do research on microfilm. About 10-15 years ago they started storing cd-rom sets, but its only been recently that you could do records research all over the world from the comfort of your home via the internet.
Its not all done. There are huge projects underway around the world to digitize old records. Until they are more complete, eventually you get through what's been done and have to go back to the routine of visiting cemetary churches and small government archives to try and gather info.
Hopefully this application of privacy rules doesn't set back the millions of us that like to research our family history. Can you image being told you have to travel across the world and prove your identity and relationship before being allowed to access government records they could just stick on the internet for you? Sounds like a step backwards to me.