I work for, and co-founded, an independent ISP. Like many independents (actual independents, not virtual ISPs), we regularly recommend AdAware and Spybot and provide basic support for them (and other programs that have little or nothing to do with our primary business). However, make no mistake about it, the only way we can afford to do this is by keeping prices above average.
The way some companies keep prices low is by treating their customers, employees, and community as resources to be exploited (e.g., partnering with spyware companies, selling service to known spammers, refusing support for anything but Windows, firing their CSRs and outsourcing support to companies who use customer service scripts). Remember this the next time you save a few dollars buying a computer, getting a DSL line, or even shopping for groceries.
I consider emergency service a social good worth paying for, and I will gladly do so via actual taxes. I even consider basic phone service a social good, just as I consider basic water service, fuel, and electricity a social good, but I see no particular reason why the government should enforce subsidization of one and not the others via subscribers' bills. If a community, state, or the country wishes to subsidize any or all of them so be it, I'll vote for that (tho I have no expectation others will do the same).
The current model, however, has the phone companies collect this tax from other subscribers, and most unlike income or property taxes it is arguably regressive. More importantly, the phone company has a large measure of control over the rate of basic service. This is usually done without effective governmental oversight as tarriffed services are negotiated between the telcos and the public utilities commissions. The decision makers in these same commissions are frequently staffed by current and former telco executives and management. I have exactly zero faith that the "tax" I pay on my phone bill to subsidize basic phone service accurately reflects what it costs to provide this service.
Anything violent contributes to a culture of violence, even something that's supposed to be a 'reflection' of a particular aspect of culture.
This is tautologically true, insofar as the violent item itself is a part of culture. One could as easily say that the addition of sugar to one's coffee contributes to its sweetness.
If you are asserting, however, that a violent video game (or other medium) makes any statistically significant, lasting contribution to real world violence, I would like to see support (as in peer-reviewed, replicated studies, not the carefree assertions of media talking heads). I am familiar with studies demonstrating that people who play violent videogames (or watch violent TV programs, or read violent books, or even imagine violent scenarios) exhibit different behaviour in the short term, such as judging defendants in imaginary criminal cases more harshly. I have yet to see any support for long-term changes or for increases in actual violent acts.
There are far, far better predictors for violent behaviour than videogames. While I don't think this is exactly a nail in the coffin of civil rights, I do think our government could be spending their time and our money more effectively, and I think we have plenty of near to totally useless laws already.
I suspect we may eventually need to take this to email should we wish to continue. Note: I'm going to ignore the differences between American and UK English in this discussion, please understand that I do so to avoid making an already long post even longer, and because I am not familiar with modern spoken UK English.
Written and oral English are not, never will be, and (in my opinion) should not be, identical. At least since the establishment of a standard written English [1], spoken English has undergone much greater flux than written, and is far more responsive to cultural changes. If a language cannot respond to changes in culture, it ceases to be useful as a tool, and becomes a religion. I doubt, for example, that you will see anyone use "bling-bling" in their dissertation (excepting students of English, linguistics, or cultural studies). Nonetheless, it has been used in spoken American English in urban areas, and increasingly nationwide, for at least a year (albeit I was unaware of the definition until a month ago). Whether it will last or not is beyond me, although I suspect not.
Extending this distinction, I would argue that formal written English differs from informal written English (e.g., used in email and slashdot posts), and that "SMS English" certainly differs from either insofar as efficiency is a significant concern while using SMS. They are different tools for different purposes, and the question of whether "gr8" will ever be part of the canon of formal written English is irrelevant. I personally do not use SMS often, and there are abbreviations still opaque to me; when in doubt, I ask, and I have yet to feel I was looked down upon for doing so. Nonetheless, when I do use SMS, the abbreviations are extremely useful.
I have already pointed out the advantages of the word "google" over "search" (specificity) or "search the Internet using a web search engine" (efficiency) as well as the fact that loss of clarity is a minor concern (Google being familiar to most). I did not touch on one additional point: Google is a trademark, and the conversion of a trademark into a commmon noun or verb is a separate issue from the verbing of common nouns (there is precedent in "xerox").
Certainly, there are cases in which a "verbed" (common) noun is unnecessary. I believe it was you who introduced the verbed noun "architect" equivalent to "design". I would agree with you that this particular word is unnecessary: it offers no advantage in efficiency or specificity, it does not fill a vacuum in the language, and it doesn't even offer any humor value. I would be surprised if it arose naturally from a subculture; as with the current overuse of "utilize" I suspect the intention was pretention.
With this specific subset of verbed nouns -- those which offer no advantages, are redundant, and were consciously constructed to seem more business-like or important -- I have concern. However, my offense at these words has nothing to do with the fact that they are verbed, and everything to do with the fact that they are unnecessary and intentionally pretentious business-speak. As such I have the same response to the overuse of "utilize", intentional obfuscation, and other language patterns one encounters at business meetings and similar religious cults.
Outside of cases where no advantage is gained, however, I see nothing wrong with the verbing of nouns. No clarity is lost, provided the noun itself is known. Admittedly, the first few times one hears a verbed noun, ones attention may be drawn from the content of the communication to the language itself, but this is the case with any unfamiliar word or grammatical pattern.
And I think what we are seeing is a change in the grammar of English towards a condition in which all nouns can be "verbed". This is not an unprecedented destination. Chinese, as I recall, has a pure-positional grammar. I personally think it would be a beneficial change, as it would increase the flexibility of the language. Whether it is beneficial or
Admittedly I'm very late in posting this response, but I'm hoping you encounter it anyway.
The problem with your argument is that it effectively prohibits a language from changing. Unless you posit a central authority for a given language (which is an elite by definition anyway), or a democratic system for voting in new words (impractical), any new word or phrase *will* come from a subset of the population for whom the word is useful, and your "arrogant and elitist attitude" comment will apply.
I do not think it is unreasonable for a given group of people who share a particular context or set of experiences to create words and phrases that are useful to them. Nor do I think it is unreasonable for same people to use those words around those "not in the know". It becomes elitist, in my opinion, when they refuse to explain them, or look down upon others for not knowing them.
Now, I will grant you that many geek terms coined largely for their humor value are overly opaque, and using them among non geeks could be elitist (depending upon context). For example, consider "grep" meaning "search for" (and implying a computer automated search). The word comes from the Unix command 'grep', itself from an editor command (global/regular expression/print). I've never personally used it among people who aren't already familiar with it, despite a slight increase in efficiency (the search target can be the direct object and "for" omitted) and a moderate increase in specificity (automated or computer searching is the default meaning).
However, contrast this with the case of "google". First, nearly everyone on the net has encountered Google at some point, so it is easily understood by most everyone who could conceivably "google" for anything. Second, it has precedents, e.g., to "xerox" a document with a Kyocera photocopier, or to wipe one's nose with a Puffs brand "kleenex" (and unlike "photocopy" or "tissue" there is no equivalent common word for "search the internet".
Like its geekier cousin "grep", "google" is more specific than "search" as it applies to the internet, and more efficient than "search the internet" (two syllables versus seven). These concerns -- efficiency and specificity -- may seem trivial to you; if so, I urge you to reconsider this the next time you hail a taximetered cabriolet.
Ultimately, though, I think such justification is unnecessary. Language evolves, that evolution invariably starts with a subset of the population, and until a word spreads, that subset is by your definition showing an "elitist, arrogant attitude" (which I suppose could also apply any time one person refers to knowledge another person does not have... but my concerns that your use of arrogance and elitism are overly broad are beyond the scope of this argument).
I'll close with one additional point. The "verbing" of nouns is sufficiently well known to have merited mention in the comic strip "Calvin & Hobbes", it certainly has precedent in English and in other languages, and (provided the noun itself is understood) the newly minted verb is easily understood.
Spend $30 a month for 56K dialup and get all the bandwidth you (and your ISP) pay for
Spend $800 plus local loop cost for a T1 and get all the bandwidth you (and your ISP) pay for
Spend $30 a month for a 1.5Mbps (or higher) DSL line, be able to burst up to full speed, sustain a reasonable throughput, and share bandwidth with everyone else.
Your $30/month DS1-or-better speed xDSL line doesn't come close to paying your ISP's cost for that much bandwidth. Instead, you're sharing bandwidth with everyone else, under the assumption that not everyone max out at the same time. If you don't like sharing, I'm sure your ISP will gladly sell you a T1 just as soon as you pony up the cash and sign a 1 to 3 year contract on the loop. Otherwise, make sure the caps are stated up front, shop around for the most lenient provider, and get used to it.
This has nothing to do with letting industry cripple anything. It's simple economics. If it weren't for bandwidth caps, you'd be on a slow line, your ISP (who pays the full price for bandwidth whether it's used or not) would be throwing cash down the toilet, and we'd all be wasting bandwidth.
Streaming media? File sharing? Video conferencing? Distributed data warehouses?
It's pretty easy to grow accustomed to fat pipes. I've saturated a DS3 to the net numerous times working on a pet project, and at my last job we were regularly saturating an OC-48 (private network) on a large-scale data mining application.
As they say, if you build it they will come. I remember when 9600MB modems came out a friend asked, in all seriousness, why anyone would need that much bandwidth. As I recall HTTP showed up a few years later.
Use != purchase, so 'user' is often more accurate than 'customer'. If you download, compile, and install software which is provided free of charge and without a support contract, you are using the software (thus 'user') but no financial transaction occurred (thus not 'customer'). I'd argue that 'subscriber' is a better (or at least more specific) term for an ISP's customer than 'customer' as well.
Mostly though I suspect the general word 'user' was drafted to fill a need and for lack of good alternatives. The range of IT tools and services is awfully diverse. A person who uses a car may be a driver, one who uses a lathe may be a machinist, but what (in the general case) is a person who uses a piece of software, or a computer?
In the case of timesharing systems specifically, a distinction was required between those who used the system and those who administrated it. Here the customer model really breaks down, e.g., students or employees.
The use of 'user' isn't unprecedented either. We speak of humans (and other primates occasionally) as "tool users". My dictionary provides the example of "public transportation user" (and when I lived in DC I heard "subway user" frequently).
Oh, and incidentally, drug addicts are properly called 'addicts'. Drug users are called 'users'. The two may be equivalent in popular misconception, but are not equivalent from a medical perspective, insofar as not all users of drugs (presribed, legal recreational, or illegal) are addicted. When people start calling you a computer junkie, feel free to get offended.
I'm all for ease of use, for computers and software that are more intuitive, but keep in mind that not everyone thinks alike.
Before I ever saw a computer, it was apparent to me, my parents, and most of all my peers, that I learned and interacted with the world differently than most people. Other geeks I know (in whatever field) have related similar experiences. I become comfortable and fluent with systems much more quickly when I can poke and prod at the guts and see how they work; systems which try to think for me or present a so-called "intuitive" interface make the wrong decisions so often I give up in frustration. The time I spend creating a mental map of a system's behaviour is usually made up for in time saved in using that system efficiently.
Even among non-geeks, I know people whose preferred mode of interacting and learning differs (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic for example). A sculptor friend, for example, complains regularly about how non-intuitive CAD and CG programs are to him.
You assume that we've conditioned ourselves to think like computers. Instead, I think we become successful with programming because computers are more intuitive to us from the very beginning (and human behaviour often less so). Why this is the case (mild aspergers syndrome? natural fluency at symbolic processing? who knows?) is a question for the cognitive psychologists, and one which I suspect won't be answered for some time.
Oh, and I don't know about anyone else, but I think that more interface choices is a *good* thing. Find what works for you. Just don't expect me to make the same choice. Oh, and please, don't be so arrogant as to assume I think as you do and my preference for "the linux geek's paradigm" must therefore be ego or cognitive dissonance.
Actually, I think staying home on the biggest shopping day of the year sounds like a brilliant idea, I'd rather shop when there are fewer people around.
Obviously, consumerism drives the US economy, I don't think many would dispute that. Suggesting that people buy less stuff they don't need is about opting out of that and (if enough people do so) changing the economy itself. And if our current economy is so fragile that it will fall apart if people stop buying crap they don't need, maybe a transition to something more resilient would be a good idea.
Keep in mind that even if the idea does catch on beyond "a few broke hippies" (incorrect and insulting, and I'd point out that a lot of mainstream cultural elements started out with a few dedicated weirdos), it won't happen overnight. There will be plenty of time for people to leave their jobs at the trinket factory and find something else. Last time I checked, the world didn't go to hell in a wheelbarrow when the horse-drawn carriage market evaporated either. I have faith that a suitably unfettered market will adapt to changes in consumer behaviour.
The choice between working twenty extra hours per week at a job I dislike so I can buy stuff I don't need, versus running my own business, spending that extra time with family and friends, and actually *saving* money for the future, isn't exactly difficult for me. Your mileage may vary. If you don't agree, it's a free country and you can vote with your wallet (as long as you don't buy any universal garage door openers).
No major disagreement re iconography and values, although I happen to think that consumerism dominates both in the US.
I run an ISP. We've considered it. It's a horrible idea.
We are required by law to be able to log sufficient information to associate IPs with customers if informed to do so by authorities. We may well be required (waiting for legal counsel answer) to keep these logs for several years. Not doing so may lead to criminal charges. By the way, incompetence and lack of resources aren't a defense any more than your cheap-ass landlord can get away with "but those smoke detectors are so pricey".
Not logging customer data is ultimately more expensive to us anyway. When AOL emails us up and says "67.32.1.1 is spamming, drop them or we drop you", a hundred bucks for a RADIUS log drive suddenly looks cheap compared to two fscking weeks of losing customers while I call their incompetent support line to get out of their blacklist.
The whole usenet thing is problematic, although the issue isn't piracy, it's kiddy porn. Usenet admins have been arguing about whether a common carrier defense would work for as long as I can remember. Fortunately, thus far no Usenet providers (or ISPs for that matter) have been charged that I know of, the authorities seem much more interested in the people who post this filth than in us. They change newsgroups regularly, and tracking readers isn't as trivial as grepping RADIUS logs, we'd basically have to monitor every newsgroup.
But if advised to do so we'll drop our news server faster than you can blink, and our customers can go to giganews et al where they have deep pockets. I'm not going to prison just so you can read alt.binaries.kinko-the-clown or whatever they're using these days. But beyond that, I don't personally give a rodent's posterior whether you're sharing the entire first season of Gilligan's Island on gnutella and sucking a month's worth of alt.binaries.mp3s.circle-jerks, as long as you don't saturate the DLSAM and we don't get a subpoena.
Don't like it? Use an anonymizer, find an open wireless access point, run freenet, and/or pull a full newsfeed (oh and have you priced OC3s lately? cuz that's what you'll need for a full feed).
BTW, you're largely right about the economics of smaller ISPs, although many of them seem to forget that customer service is ultimately the most important part of the business.
I think a lot of people are confused about what this box does, and what it doesn't, do.
By using FPGAs to scan network traffic (not a new idea, by the way), the device looks for fixed signatures much faster than an equivalent software solution can do so (yes, software may control it, but the actual "decisions" are made by hardware. Think level 3 switch). I'm guessing there's probably some sort of state engine implemented in the FPGAs (I haven't kept up on field-programmable logic), and optimization to look for multiple signatures in parallel, but that's just a guess. It's no different in theory from a virus detection add-on to a mail transfer agent that uses fixed string (as opposed to regex) detection, it's just much more efficient.
Because there's no regex capability, any attempt to use this box for censorship will fail. For example, suppose your upstream programs in a ruleset to match "nuclear". Fine, just pull a Dubya and use "nucular", or "nuke", or "nook-yoo-lar". Problem solved. Or for that matter just zip, tarball, or rot-13 encrypt your file before sending it.
Furthermore, no actual signature would be this short; the false positive rate would be enormous. In practice expect signature lengths of 64 bytes and up, which is what we use when scanning email traffic for viruses.
Why is this a good thing? Keep in mind this is NOT intended as an end-user box, it's intended for network providers. As one, I can tell you that viruses and worms cost real money. Even when we do disable customers for virus activity (and invariably piss off most of them), it takes time to detect and do this. It also takes staff hours; tracking down the customer's username isn't always trivial (RADIUS accounting packets get lost, some outsourced dialup providers send accounting data only on termination, and open wireless points are a huge pain)
For example, Nachi sends out vast numbers of ICMP pings to sequential IP addresses, which rapidly fills the IP cache and depletes the memory of many Cisco routers (why they cache IPs for ICMP is beyond me, but they do, and the patch -- which requires a maintenance contract to get by the way -- doesn't work very well). Watching multi-kilobuck routers die repeatedly because a handful of customers have a worm is NOT my idea of a good day. And don't get me started on mail server load.
I don't know what price they're going to ask for this, but if it's reasonable ($10K or lower) it could easily pay for itself in six months for us. Even if it's an order of magnitude pricier, larger NSPs will probably snatch them up if they work. Trying to do this in software with the same bandwidth (the article quoted 2.4Gbps, right?) may well cost more, esp. when you have to drop a couple of OC-whatever cards in your linux box, harden it, and make sure it never *ever* goes down.
From time to time I would pick up the original article and attempt a proof that a given worm would terminate or repeat infinitely, and not get very far, and I'd hoped someone else would succeed. And in general, I am concerned that the best AI we have often amounts to "do something extremely stupid as fast as possible and hope you get lucky".
But in this case, I'm not sure it applies. Many very simple equations produce incredible complexity when you repeat them often enough... the canonical example I learned was
z' = cz(1-z)
(or the more familiar z' = z*z-c, which produces the Mandelbrot set if you iterate c across the complex plane and start z at 0). In some cases you can predict the type of attractor you'll wind up with (and I don't recall the taxonomy, it's been well over a decade), or what the basin of attraction will be, but in the general case you can't (as I recall that's been proven but I could be wrong, like I said it's been awhile).
So while I agree with you in general -- that brute force is a stupid way of solving problems and just goes to show how long we have to go with AI) -- Patterson's worms may fall into the set of problems for which brute force is the only approach to a solution
(proof of this is left as an exercise for the reader).
I'd say the disadvantages far outweight the advantages, but that's my personal opinion.
I think the net reflects, to a great degree, the expectations of its users. I can remember back when there was no spam, Usenet was truly useful, and worms and viruses were exceedingly rare. The barrier to entry for the net was *very* high. Because of this, users tended to be participants more than observers.
As useful as the web is, it ushered in wave after wave of people whose prior experience with visual media was television. They bypassed the usual education of net.culture that one previously received by participating, as well as the ethical and practical lessons given by one's school or organization (and enforced by one's local surly sysadmin).
Now that people *expect* the net to be "television that you can click on", I think they are more likely to accept without complaint the commercialization and concentration of power that occurs with traditional broadcast media. Those of us who try to take a stand against this trend now seem outdated at best, radical kooks at worst.
To the extent that I think UF the strip has declined, and that his business model was tenuous at best, I agree with you. I don't participate in that community, so I can't comment on the politics thereof. I also skipped the strip around 9/11 (lived in DC, had real work to do) so I'll bypass that issue as well.
I think you missed an important reason why the strip has declined. The subject matter, and the intended audience, are far narrower than Dilbert. Dilbert's appeal extends beyond the IT industry to engineering corporate culture and maybe corporate culture in general. I'd argue that UF's appeal is narrower than even the IT industry; many of the jokes are very specific to the ISP business (and possibly closely related ones).
Mind you, if you do work in an ISP, the strip can still be coffee-spewingly funny at times. And I think it benefits from reading an entire month at once because, let's face it, some days Iliad misses by a mile.
But there's a limit to how much new material you can pull out of this industry without either getting overly technical (and thus turning off people who don't have direct experience), or getting into overly complex and definitely un-funny issues (e.g., how do you make a strip about Verizon's wholesale DSL mis-billing dispute process as covert subversion of the Telecomm Bill?)
Mostly, I think Iliad needs a break, a day job that gives him time to do the strip, and a renewed sense of sarcasm and irony.
as do most forms of discipline *if* they are applied rapidly and consistently. But how often do you hear a parent tell a child "stop that" or "no", and then either give in or just ignore the child completely when s/he misbehaves again? Or be lax 90% of the time, and punish the child violently the other 10% of the time, with no obvious cause other than the parent's mood?
There's tons of research on this, and it's largely consistent with the idea that setting limits *and enforcing them* is more effective than either inconsistent / no discipline (permissive parenting) or rigid limits and arbitrary punishment (autocratic parenting). It works the same way with rats, for that matter. Unfortunately, since this doesn't really toe the conservative *or* liberal party lines on parenting, it doesn't get much press.
Personal responsibility is key here. If you don't have the time to pay attention to children, and teach them how to behave properly, go to the shelter and get a pet. Messed up pets don't go around shooting people.
If you think that physical discipline is sufficient to raise well-behaved kids, I've got a whole rural town full of counterexamples for you (and I'm sure others can provide examples of the failure of permissive parenting). But you'll get no argument from me that the lack of personal responsibility is a very bad thing.
PS: I don't believe that spanking your kids is the same as abusing them. However, I've encountered a lot of people who don't get the difference between spanking a kid to correct a behavior when other methods fail, and beating the crap out of a kid because they're pissed (or drunk, or whatever).
Actually, the concern I've heard raised is whether the system can be driven outside the range of homeostasis into some form of positive feedback (thermal runaway). Recent articles on the climate of venus covered this, for example (I was surprised to discover that loss of surface water could affect plate tectonics).
Note - I am not claiming that release of CO2 is causing the current global warming, or that the global warming will lead to thermal runaway. I'm only pointing out that there's evidence that thermal runaway *did* occur on another planet, and suggesting that it may be a bit much to expect that our climate has no attractor points incompatible with life as we know it.
Personally, I think it's possible that man-made CO2 emissions may lead to global warming, the consequences of same could be rather unpleasant to us, and we ought to reduce CO2 emissions (e.g., nuclear power) until we know better. I think it's entirely appropriate to consider the magnitude of a risk as well as its probability and/or the degree to which we know that probability. But I'll admit that the CO2-global warming connection is far from proven.
As to the project, while I agree that the methods aren't ideal, I'm sure they would welcome any better alternative you could provide.
I've done business with verisign, and the companies it purchased, for about eight years now. I choose a competitor whenever possible precisely because, among other reasons, they do not deliver decent service at a decent price. In this instance, it is not possible to choose a competitor for DNS queries in the.com/.net gTLDs.
The reason why I (and I suspect so many others) object to their actions is that they have taken advantage of their role as caretaker of the.com/.net gTLDs, and have done so in a way that has broken everything from spam filters to network printers (not to mention applicable standards!).
One analogy I've been using recently is: Imagine you hire someone to be caretaker of your house, and they turn it into a bar and start raking in money using your property.
As a business owner myself, I have zero problems with making a buck or surviving as a company so long as you keep an eye on ethics.
Last time I checked our LEC couldn't handle SDSL and I don't even know that they're tarriffed to offer it here. And we can't guarantee a CIR or uptime on DSL even if we wanted to, given the constraints of the LEC's equipment. And then there's that little problem that most of our customers do NOT live close to the switch.
We do guarantee CIR and uptime on T1s, we also provide 24/7 NOC support (which one of the more expensive chunk of our costs), we don't limit bandwidth or filter ports.
DSL (and other consumer-grade) port-charge pricing is *always* based upon average consumption, not on the idea that you'll saturate the line. If we ever run shy on bandwidth I suspect we'll start traffic shaping or rate limiting consumer-grade lines. We're no different than any other ISP in this regard.
and we should all have world peace and as much free beer as we can drink.
Get real.
Laying fiber costs money... real money. Don't believe me? Try calling up a few contractors and asking... or call up the power company and ask their rate on having your own lines placed on their poles (which you have to hire them to do). You'd better be sitting down before you hear the answer.
And then someone's got to pay for the switches and routers, and the NOC staff, and repairs when some jerkweed with a backhoe cuts a line, and maybe even reimbursement for property easements. Not to mention whoever you're getting your data from has to pay port and loop charges and will pass those along.
As for telecom monopolies preventing broadband adoption... I have plenty of complaints about the telcos, their anticompetitive practices, and the lack of real oversight into same, and I could talk your ear off bitching about Verizon (I co-own an ISP), but the idea that they're keeping symmetric DSL under lock and key in some vault along with those carburetors that get 200 miles per gallon is ridiculous. DSL is asymmetric for technological reasons, not political ones.
Want a symmetrical line? They have them, they're called T1s, and your local ISP will gladly sell you one. Not fast enough? Call UUnet and ask about port and local loop charges on a T3. But depending on where you live, you may be coughing up twenty kilobucks or more per month.
bug tracking is easy... its either there and you fix it, or
its sun/ibm's fault and you wait or work around it
As far as I know (and if I'm wrong please correct me), the Java toolchain is still closed source. I've certainly never found the source code for the Java interpreter or libraries, and the license makes it clear that Java is owned by Sun, not by the community.
When Microsoft does this, everyone in the linux community (rightfully) declares the evils of closed-source applictions; why are we so willing to forgive the same behaviour from Sun?
I've used several Java apps where problems have been traced to Java itself. There's no solution, except to wait for Sun to get around to fixing the problem; in at least one case Sun admitted to the bug, but declared it a low priority item that would not be fixed in the near future. Were this a problem with the Perl interpreter, or gcc, we could have patched the code and submitted the patch ourselves.
Please note that I'm not complaining about the Java language itself. I wouldn't use Java for all applications, but neither would I use any other language for all applications. But I'm disinclined to use it at all so long as the toolchain and the language are controlled by a single vendor.
Discovering database schema is trivial with many DBMSes, only slightly less trivial in the others. And why would you want to hide your database schema? Anyone who truly wants to steal your schema will have the tools or knowledge to do so. Those most affected will be customers who want to run their own SQL queries against the DB.
I can see the virtue of dynamic SQL queries -- I use them myself occasionally -- although a well-designed DB can go a long way towards reducing the need. However, you've still got a performance hit and increased code complexity with dynamically constructed queries. In a relatively simple app where runtime isn't an issue this is less relevant, on a 100KLOCS app with a hundred million or so entities it's not necessarily a good idea.
Re:They are criminals, so how is this abuse?
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RFID Hell
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If we (the US) decide to change the punishment for raping a child to life in prison without parole, I'll have no problem with that, though I think it ought to be consistent with similar violent crimes e.g., murder (an abused child can recover, a murdered child cannot). However:
1. The medical and legal definition of pedophilia differ. An 18 year old can be convicted for having consensual sex with her or his 14 or 15 year old boy/girlfriend. For that matter, I know of at least one case where two minors (16 and 17, IIRC) were charged with a sex crime for having consensual sex. When I was in high school I knew several (underage) males whose greatest ambition was to have sex with an older woman (college, friend's mom, etc.). Those who succeeded were by no means abused (unless abuse is defined in a circular fashion), and I don't think their partners should be punished for increasing their popularity.
2. Pedophiles have a high recidivism rate, and this is part of the justification for permanent monitoring, sex offender registration, or "release" into permanent psychiatric confinement. However, other crimes with high recidivism rates are not treated equivalently. AFAIK sex offenders are the only criminals who are punished, subsequent to serving their sentences, for crimes they *might* commit. If we're going to punish people for crimes they have a high probability of committing, we'd better start locking up certain racial minorities, males, and poor people (one could argue we already do via drug laws, of course).
3. There are well-documented cases in which children were influenced (via "interview" tactics conceptually equivalent to brainwashing) by therapists or prosecutors to believe that abuse occurred, which was later shown to be incorrect if not impossible. A few of them are quite outlandish and unbelievable (vast satanic conspiracies with baby sacrifices were popular several years ago). Grep for "false memory syndrome" on google and you'll find plenty.
At present our society approaches child sexual abuse in a highly irrational manner. What really worries me is that this could make it *more* difficult to actually find, convict, and lock up the people who are abusing children (sexually or otherwise). Understandable or not, hysteria is rarely helpful.
The article was about pedophiles, not terrorists. As abhorrent as child abuse (of any kind) is, it's not a terrorist act against the state.
As to terrorists "not playing by any rules": First off, you are incorrect, they do operate according to rules, just ones that I (and I suspect you) do not agree with. Second, even if you grant that one ought to play dirty against terrorists (since they're playing dirty as well, and lowering ourselves to their level is the correct thing to do), the real problem is you don't know who is a terrorist. If you do, you can arrest and convict them without the Patriot Act (or equivalent); if you don't, you will be targetting non-terrorists, possibly innocent civilians.
Third, and perhaps most troubling to me, when a new law restricts civil liberties, even if you trust the current government when they say "trust us, we'll only use this power against the bad guys", there is no guarantee that the next set of bastards won't reneg on that promise. People and groups in power become accustomed to the tools of power they have available and rarely, if ever, give them up without being forced to do so. That's why you keep hearing the slippery slope argument in discussions of civil liberties.
Sooner or later, someone is going to decide that GPS tracking of murderers, rapists, or other criminals who have done their time is a good idea. I have no argument with putting criminals in prison (excepting vice crimes). However, I find the idea of perpetual monitoring to be in conflict with the idea of finite prison sentences. Either keep criminals in prison (or possibly on parole) forever, or let them rejoin society without burden. At least those options are honest.
Slashdot Mirror
The way some companies keep prices low is by treating their customers, employees, and community as resources to be exploited (e.g., partnering with spyware companies, selling service to known spammers, refusing support for anything but Windows, firing their CSRs and outsourcing support to companies who use customer service scripts). Remember this the next time you save a few dollars buying a computer, getting a DSL line, or even shopping for groceries.
The current model, however, has the phone companies collect this tax from other subscribers, and most unlike income or property taxes it is arguably regressive. More importantly, the phone company has a large measure of control over the rate of basic service. This is usually done without effective governmental oversight as tarriffed services are negotiated between the telcos and the public utilities commissions. The decision makers in these same commissions are frequently staffed by current and former telco executives and management. I have exactly zero faith that the "tax" I pay on my phone bill to subsidize basic phone service accurately reflects what it costs to provide this service.
This is tautologically true, insofar as the violent item itself is a part of culture. One could as easily say that the addition of sugar to one's coffee contributes to its sweetness.
If you are asserting, however, that a violent video game (or other medium) makes any statistically significant, lasting contribution to real world violence, I would like to see support (as in peer-reviewed, replicated studies, not the carefree assertions of media talking heads). I am familiar with studies demonstrating that people who play violent videogames (or watch violent TV programs, or read violent books, or even imagine violent scenarios) exhibit different behaviour in the short term, such as judging defendants in imaginary criminal cases more harshly. I have yet to see any support for long-term changes or for increases in actual violent acts.
There are far, far better predictors for violent behaviour than videogames. While I don't think this is exactly a nail in the coffin of civil rights, I do think our government could be spending their time and our money more effectively, and I think we have plenty of near to totally useless laws already.
Written and oral English are not, never will be, and (in my opinion) should not be, identical. At least since the establishment of a standard written English [1], spoken English has undergone much greater flux than written, and is far more responsive to cultural changes. If a language cannot respond to changes in culture, it ceases to be useful as a tool, and becomes a religion. I doubt, for example, that you will see anyone use "bling-bling" in their dissertation (excepting students of English, linguistics, or cultural studies). Nonetheless, it has been used in spoken American English in urban areas, and increasingly nationwide, for at least a year (albeit I was unaware of the definition until a month ago). Whether it will last or not is beyond me, although I suspect not.
Extending this distinction, I would argue that formal written English differs from informal written English (e.g., used in email and slashdot posts), and that "SMS English" certainly differs from either insofar as efficiency is a significant concern while using SMS. They are different tools for different purposes, and the question of whether "gr8" will ever be part of the canon of formal written English is irrelevant. I personally do not use SMS often, and there are abbreviations still opaque to me; when in doubt, I ask, and I have yet to feel I was looked down upon for doing so. Nonetheless, when I do use SMS, the abbreviations are extremely useful.
I have already pointed out the advantages of the word "google" over "search" (specificity) or "search the Internet using a web search engine" (efficiency) as well as the fact that loss of clarity is a minor concern (Google being familiar to most). I did not touch on one additional point: Google is a trademark, and the conversion of a trademark into a commmon noun or verb is a separate issue from the verbing of common nouns (there is precedent in "xerox").
Certainly, there are cases in which a "verbed" (common) noun is unnecessary. I believe it was you who introduced the verbed noun "architect" equivalent to "design". I would agree with you that this particular word is unnecessary: it offers no advantage in efficiency or specificity, it does not fill a vacuum in the language, and it doesn't even offer any humor value. I would be surprised if it arose naturally from a subculture; as with the current overuse of "utilize" I suspect the intention was pretention.
With this specific subset of verbed nouns -- those which offer no advantages, are redundant, and were consciously constructed to seem more business-like or important -- I have concern. However, my offense at these words has nothing to do with the fact that they are verbed, and everything to do with the fact that they are unnecessary and intentionally pretentious business-speak. As such I have the same response to the overuse of "utilize", intentional obfuscation, and other language patterns one encounters at business meetings and similar religious cults.
Outside of cases where no advantage is gained, however, I see nothing wrong with the verbing of nouns. No clarity is lost, provided the noun itself is known. Admittedly, the first few times one hears a verbed noun, ones attention may be drawn from the content of the communication to the language itself, but this is the case with any unfamiliar word or grammatical pattern.
And I think what we are seeing is a change in the grammar of English towards a condition in which all nouns can be "verbed". This is not an unprecedented destination. Chinese, as I recall, has a pure-positional grammar. I personally think it would be a beneficial change, as it would increase the flexibility of the language. Whether it is beneficial or
The problem with your argument is that it effectively prohibits a language from changing. Unless you posit a central authority for a given language (which is an elite by definition anyway), or a democratic system for voting in new words (impractical), any new word or phrase *will* come from a subset of the population for whom the word is useful, and your "arrogant and elitist attitude" comment will apply.
I do not think it is unreasonable for a given group of people who share a particular context or set of experiences to create words and phrases that are useful to them. Nor do I think it is unreasonable for same people to use those words around those "not in the know". It becomes elitist, in my opinion, when they refuse to explain them, or look down upon others for not knowing them.
Now, I will grant you that many geek terms coined largely for their humor value are overly opaque, and using them among non geeks could be elitist (depending upon context). For example, consider "grep" meaning "search for" (and implying a computer automated search). The word comes from the Unix command 'grep', itself from an editor command (global/regular expression/print). I've never personally used it among people who aren't already familiar with it, despite a slight increase in efficiency (the search target can be the direct object and "for" omitted) and a moderate increase in specificity (automated or computer searching is the default meaning).
However, contrast this with the case of "google". First, nearly everyone on the net has encountered Google at some point, so it is easily understood by most everyone who could conceivably "google" for anything. Second, it has precedents, e.g., to "xerox" a document with a Kyocera photocopier, or to wipe one's nose with a Puffs brand "kleenex" (and unlike "photocopy" or "tissue" there is no equivalent common word for "search the internet".
Like its geekier cousin "grep", "google" is more specific than "search" as it applies to the internet, and more efficient than "search the internet" (two syllables versus seven). These concerns -- efficiency and specificity -- may seem trivial to you; if so, I urge you to reconsider this the next time you hail a taximetered cabriolet.
Ultimately, though, I think such justification is unnecessary. Language evolves, that evolution invariably starts with a subset of the population, and until a word spreads, that subset is by your definition showing an "elitist, arrogant attitude" (which I suppose could also apply any time one person refers to knowledge another person does not have ... but my concerns that your use of arrogance and elitism are overly broad are beyond the scope of this argument).
I'll close with one additional point. The "verbing" of nouns is sufficiently well known to have merited mention in the comic strip "Calvin & Hobbes", it certainly has precedent in English and in other languages, and (provided the noun itself is understood) the newly minted verb is easily understood.
A good introduction to the technology and how it differs from RF is here
Your $30/month DS1-or-better speed xDSL line doesn't come close to paying your ISP's cost for that much bandwidth. Instead, you're sharing bandwidth with everyone else, under the assumption that not everyone max out at the same time. If you don't like sharing, I'm sure your ISP will gladly sell you a T1 just as soon as you pony up the cash and sign a 1 to 3 year contract on the loop. Otherwise, make sure the caps are stated up front, shop around for the most lenient provider, and get used to it.
This has nothing to do with letting industry cripple anything. It's simple economics. If it weren't for bandwidth caps, you'd be on a slow line, your ISP (who pays the full price for bandwidth whether it's used or not) would be throwing cash down the toilet, and we'd all be wasting bandwidth.
It's pretty easy to grow accustomed to fat pipes. I've saturated a DS3 to the net numerous times working on a pet project, and at my last job we were regularly saturating an OC-48 (private network) on a large-scale data mining application.
As they say, if you build it they will come. I remember when 9600MB modems came out a friend asked, in all seriousness, why anyone would need that much bandwidth. As I recall HTTP showed up a few years later.
Mostly though I suspect the general word 'user' was drafted to fill a need and for lack of good alternatives. The range of IT tools and services is awfully diverse. A person who uses a car may be a driver, one who uses a lathe may be a machinist, but what (in the general case) is a person who uses a piece of software, or a computer?
In the case of timesharing systems specifically, a distinction was required between those who used the system and those who administrated it. Here the customer model really breaks down, e.g., students or employees.
The use of 'user' isn't unprecedented either. We speak of humans (and other primates occasionally) as "tool users". My dictionary provides the example of "public transportation user" (and when I lived in DC I heard "subway user" frequently).
Oh, and incidentally, drug addicts are properly called 'addicts'. Drug users are called 'users'. The two may be equivalent in popular misconception, but are not equivalent from a medical perspective, insofar as not all users of drugs (presribed, legal recreational, or illegal) are addicted. When people start calling you a computer junkie, feel free to get offended.
Before I ever saw a computer, it was apparent to me, my parents, and most of all my peers, that I learned and interacted with the world differently than most people. Other geeks I know (in whatever field) have related similar experiences. I become comfortable and fluent with systems much more quickly when I can poke and prod at the guts and see how they work; systems which try to think for me or present a so-called "intuitive" interface make the wrong decisions so often I give up in frustration. The time I spend creating a mental map of a system's behaviour is usually made up for in time saved in using that system efficiently.
Even among non-geeks, I know people whose preferred mode of interacting and learning differs (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic for example). A sculptor friend, for example, complains regularly about how non-intuitive CAD and CG programs are to him.
You assume that we've conditioned ourselves to think like computers. Instead, I think we become successful with programming because computers are more intuitive to us from the very beginning (and human behaviour often less so). Why this is the case (mild aspergers syndrome? natural fluency at symbolic processing? who knows?) is a question for the cognitive psychologists, and one which I suspect won't be answered for some time.
Oh, and I don't know about anyone else, but I think that more interface choices is a *good* thing. Find what works for you. Just don't expect me to make the same choice. Oh, and please, don't be so arrogant as to assume I think as you do and my preference for "the linux geek's paradigm" must therefore be ego or cognitive dissonance.
Obviously, consumerism drives the US economy, I don't think many would dispute that. Suggesting that people buy less stuff they don't need is about opting out of that and (if enough people do so) changing the economy itself. And if our current economy is so fragile that it will fall apart if people stop buying crap they don't need, maybe a transition to something more resilient would be a good idea.
Keep in mind that even if the idea does catch on beyond "a few broke hippies" (incorrect and insulting, and I'd point out that a lot of mainstream cultural elements started out with a few dedicated weirdos), it won't happen overnight. There will be plenty of time for people to leave their jobs at the trinket factory and find something else. Last time I checked, the world didn't go to hell in a wheelbarrow when the horse-drawn carriage market evaporated either. I have faith that a suitably unfettered market will adapt to changes in consumer behaviour.
The choice between working twenty extra hours per week at a job I dislike so I can buy stuff I don't need, versus running my own business, spending that extra time with family and friends, and actually *saving* money for the future, isn't exactly difficult for me. Your mileage may vary. If you don't agree, it's a free country and you can vote with your wallet (as long as you don't buy any universal garage door openers).
No major disagreement re iconography and values, although I happen to think that consumerism dominates both in the US.
We are required by law to be able to log sufficient information to associate IPs with customers if informed to do so by authorities. We may well be required (waiting for legal counsel answer) to keep these logs for several years. Not doing so may lead to criminal charges. By the way, incompetence and lack of resources aren't a defense any more than your cheap-ass landlord can get away with "but those smoke detectors are so pricey".
Not logging customer data is ultimately more expensive to us anyway. When AOL emails us up and says "67.32.1.1 is spamming, drop them or we drop you", a hundred bucks for a RADIUS log drive suddenly looks cheap compared to two fscking weeks of losing customers while I call their incompetent support line to get out of their blacklist.
The whole usenet thing is problematic, although the issue isn't piracy, it's kiddy porn. Usenet admins have been arguing about whether a common carrier defense would work for as long as I can remember. Fortunately, thus far no Usenet providers (or ISPs for that matter) have been charged that I know of, the authorities seem much more interested in the people who post this filth than in us. They change newsgroups regularly, and tracking readers isn't as trivial as grepping RADIUS logs, we'd basically have to monitor every newsgroup.
But if advised to do so we'll drop our news server faster than you can blink, and our customers can go to giganews et al where they have deep pockets. I'm not going to prison just so you can read alt.binaries.kinko-the-clown or whatever they're using these days. But beyond that, I don't personally give a rodent's posterior whether you're sharing the entire first season of Gilligan's Island on gnutella and sucking a month's worth of alt.binaries.mp3s.circle-jerks, as long as you don't saturate the DLSAM and we don't get a subpoena.
Don't like it? Use an anonymizer, find an open wireless access point, run freenet, and/or pull a full newsfeed (oh and have you priced OC3s lately? cuz that's what you'll need for a full feed).
BTW, you're largely right about the economics of smaller ISPs, although many of them seem to forget that customer service is ultimately the most important part of the business.
By using FPGAs to scan network traffic (not a new idea, by the way), the device looks for fixed signatures much faster than an equivalent software solution can do so (yes, software may control it, but the actual "decisions" are made by hardware. Think level 3 switch). I'm guessing there's probably some sort of state engine implemented in the FPGAs (I haven't kept up on field-programmable logic), and optimization to look for multiple signatures in parallel, but that's just a guess. It's no different in theory from a virus detection add-on to a mail transfer agent that uses fixed string (as opposed to regex) detection, it's just much more efficient.
Because there's no regex capability, any attempt to use this box for censorship will fail. For example, suppose your upstream programs in a ruleset to match "nuclear". Fine, just pull a Dubya and use "nucular", or "nuke", or "nook-yoo-lar". Problem solved. Or for that matter just zip, tarball, or rot-13 encrypt your file before sending it.
Furthermore, no actual signature would be this short; the false positive rate would be enormous. In practice expect signature lengths of 64 bytes and up, which is what we use when scanning email traffic for viruses.
Why is this a good thing? Keep in mind this is NOT intended as an end-user box, it's intended for network providers. As one, I can tell you that viruses and worms cost real money. Even when we do disable customers for virus activity (and invariably piss off most of them), it takes time to detect and do this. It also takes staff hours; tracking down the customer's username isn't always trivial (RADIUS accounting packets get lost, some outsourced dialup providers send accounting data only on termination, and open wireless points are a huge pain)
For example, Nachi sends out vast numbers of ICMP pings to sequential IP addresses, which rapidly fills the IP cache and depletes the memory of many Cisco routers (why they cache IPs for ICMP is beyond me, but they do, and the patch -- which requires a maintenance contract to get by the way -- doesn't work very well). Watching multi-kilobuck routers die repeatedly because a handful of customers have a worm is NOT my idea of a good day. And don't get me started on mail server load.
I don't know what price they're going to ask for this, but if it's reasonable ($10K or lower) it could easily pay for itself in six months for us. Even if it's an order of magnitude pricier, larger NSPs will probably snatch them up if they work. Trying to do this in software with the same bandwidth (the article quoted 2.4Gbps, right?) may well cost more, esp. when you have to drop a couple of OC-whatever cards in your linux box, harden it, and make sure it never *ever* goes down.
From time to time I would pick up the original article and attempt a proof that a given worm would terminate or repeat infinitely, and not get very far, and I'd hoped someone else would succeed. And in general, I am concerned that the best AI we have often amounts to "do something extremely stupid as fast as possible and hope you get lucky".
But in this case, I'm not sure it applies. Many very simple equations produce incredible complexity when you repeat them often enough ... the canonical example I learned was
z' = cz(1-z)
(or the more familiar z' = z*z-c, which produces the Mandelbrot set if you iterate c across the complex plane and start z at 0). In some cases you can predict the type of attractor you'll wind up with (and I don't recall the taxonomy, it's been well over a decade), or what the basin of attraction will be, but in the general case you can't (as I recall that's been proven but I could be wrong, like I said it's been awhile).
So while I agree with you in general -- that brute force is a stupid way of solving problems and just goes to show how long we have to go with AI) -- Patterson's worms may fall into the set of problems for which brute force is the only approach to a solution (proof of this is left as an exercise for the reader).
I think the net reflects, to a great degree, the expectations of its users. I can remember back when there was no spam, Usenet was truly useful, and worms and viruses were exceedingly rare. The barrier to entry for the net was *very* high. Because of this, users tended to be participants more than observers.
As useful as the web is, it ushered in wave after wave of people whose prior experience with visual media was television. They bypassed the usual education of net.culture that one previously received by participating, as well as the ethical and practical lessons given by one's school or organization (and enforced by one's local surly sysadmin).
Now that people *expect* the net to be "television that you can click on", I think they are more likely to accept without complaint the commercialization and concentration of power that occurs with traditional broadcast media. Those of us who try to take a stand against this trend now seem outdated at best, radical kooks at worst.
I think you missed an important reason why the strip has declined. The subject matter, and the intended audience, are far narrower than Dilbert. Dilbert's appeal extends beyond the IT industry to engineering corporate culture and maybe corporate culture in general. I'd argue that UF's appeal is narrower than even the IT industry; many of the jokes are very specific to the ISP business (and possibly closely related ones).
Mind you, if you do work in an ISP, the strip can still be coffee-spewingly funny at times. And I think it benefits from reading an entire month at once because, let's face it, some days Iliad misses by a mile.
But there's a limit to how much new material you can pull out of this industry without either getting overly technical (and thus turning off people who don't have direct experience), or getting into overly complex and definitely un-funny issues (e.g., how do you make a strip about Verizon's wholesale DSL mis-billing dispute process as covert subversion of the Telecomm Bill?)
Mostly, I think Iliad needs a break, a day job that gives him time to do the strip, and a renewed sense of sarcasm and irony.
There's tons of research on this, and it's largely consistent with the idea that setting limits *and enforcing them* is more effective than either inconsistent / no discipline (permissive parenting) or rigid limits and arbitrary punishment (autocratic parenting). It works the same way with rats, for that matter. Unfortunately, since this doesn't really toe the conservative *or* liberal party lines on parenting, it doesn't get much press.
Personal responsibility is key here. If you don't have the time to pay attention to children, and teach them how to behave properly, go to the shelter and get a pet. Messed up pets don't go around shooting people.
If you think that physical discipline is sufficient to raise well-behaved kids, I've got a whole rural town full of counterexamples for you (and I'm sure others can provide examples of the failure of permissive parenting). But you'll get no argument from me that the lack of personal responsibility is a very bad thing.
PS: I don't believe that spanking your kids is the same as abusing them. However, I've encountered a lot of people who don't get the difference between spanking a kid to correct a behavior when other methods fail, and beating the crap out of a kid because they're pissed (or drunk, or whatever).
Note - I am not claiming that release of CO2 is causing the current global warming, or that the global warming will lead to thermal runaway. I'm only pointing out that there's evidence that thermal runaway *did* occur on another planet, and suggesting that it may be a bit much to expect that our climate has no attractor points incompatible with life as we know it.
Personally, I think it's possible that man-made CO2 emissions may lead to global warming, the consequences of same could be rather unpleasant to us, and we ought to reduce CO2 emissions (e.g., nuclear power) until we know better. I think it's entirely appropriate to consider the magnitude of a risk as well as its probability and/or the degree to which we know that probability. But I'll admit that the CO2-global warming connection is far from proven.
As to the project, while I agree that the methods aren't ideal, I'm sure they would welcome any better alternative you could provide.
The reason why I (and I suspect so many others) object to their actions is that they have taken advantage of their role as caretaker of the .com/.net gTLDs, and have done so in a way that has broken everything from spam filters to network printers (not to mention applicable standards!).
One analogy I've been using recently is: Imagine you hire someone to be caretaker of your house, and they turn it into a bar and start raking in money using your property.
As a business owner myself, I have zero problems with making a buck or surviving as a company so long as you keep an eye on ethics.
We do guarantee CIR and uptime on T1s, we also provide 24/7 NOC support (which one of the more expensive chunk of our costs), we don't limit bandwidth or filter ports.
DSL (and other consumer-grade) port-charge pricing is *always* based upon average consumption, not on the idea that you'll saturate the line. If we ever run shy on bandwidth I suspect we'll start traffic shaping or rate limiting consumer-grade lines. We're no different than any other ISP in this regard.
(Oh, and a T1 in the states is 1.544Mbps)
Get real.
Laying fiber costs money ... real money. Don't believe me? Try calling up a few contractors and asking ... or call up the power company and ask their rate on having your own lines placed on their poles (which you have to hire them to do). You'd better be sitting down before you hear the answer.
And then someone's got to pay for the switches and routers, and the NOC staff, and repairs when some jerkweed with a backhoe cuts a line, and maybe even reimbursement for property easements. Not to mention whoever you're getting your data from has to pay port and loop charges and will pass those along.
As for telecom monopolies preventing broadband adoption ... I have plenty of complaints about the telcos, their anticompetitive practices, and the lack of real oversight into same, and I could talk your ear off bitching about Verizon (I co-own an ISP), but the idea that they're keeping symmetric DSL under lock and key in some vault along with those carburetors that get 200 miles per gallon is ridiculous. DSL is asymmetric for technological reasons, not political ones.
Want a symmetrical line? They have them, they're called T1s, and your local ISP will gladly sell you one. Not fast enough? Call UUnet and ask about port and local loop charges on a T3. But depending on where you live, you may be coughing up twenty kilobucks or more per month.
As far as I know (and if I'm wrong please correct me), the Java toolchain is still closed source. I've certainly never found the source code for the Java interpreter or libraries, and the license makes it clear that Java is owned by Sun, not by the community. When Microsoft does this, everyone in the linux community (rightfully) declares the evils of closed-source applictions; why are we so willing to forgive the same behaviour from Sun?
I've used several Java apps where problems have been traced to Java itself. There's no solution, except to wait for Sun to get around to fixing the problem; in at least one case Sun admitted to the bug, but declared it a low priority item that would not be fixed in the near future. Were this a problem with the Perl interpreter, or gcc, we could have patched the code and submitted the patch ourselves.
Please note that I'm not complaining about the Java language itself. I wouldn't use Java for all applications, but neither would I use any other language for all applications. But I'm disinclined to use it at all so long as the toolchain and the language are controlled by a single vendor.
I can see the virtue of dynamic SQL queries -- I use them myself occasionally -- although a well-designed DB can go a long way towards reducing the need. However, you've still got a performance hit and increased code complexity with dynamically constructed queries. In a relatively simple app where runtime isn't an issue this is less relevant, on a 100KLOCS app with a hundred million or so entities it's not necessarily a good idea.
1. The medical and legal definition of pedophilia differ. An 18 year old can be convicted for having consensual sex with her or his 14 or 15 year old boy/girlfriend. For that matter, I know of at least one case where two minors (16 and 17, IIRC) were charged with a sex crime for having consensual sex. When I was in high school I knew several (underage) males whose greatest ambition was to have sex with an older woman (college, friend's mom, etc.). Those who succeeded were by no means abused (unless abuse is defined in a circular fashion), and I don't think their partners should be punished for increasing their popularity.
2. Pedophiles have a high recidivism rate, and this is part of the justification for permanent monitoring, sex offender registration, or "release" into permanent psychiatric confinement. However, other crimes with high recidivism rates are not treated equivalently. AFAIK sex offenders are the only criminals who are punished, subsequent to serving their sentences, for crimes they *might* commit. If we're going to punish people for crimes they have a high probability of committing, we'd better start locking up certain racial minorities, males, and poor people (one could argue we already do via drug laws, of course).
3. There are well-documented cases in which children were influenced (via "interview" tactics conceptually equivalent to brainwashing) by therapists or prosecutors to believe that abuse occurred, which was later shown to be incorrect if not impossible. A few of them are quite outlandish and unbelievable (vast satanic conspiracies with baby sacrifices were popular several years ago). Grep for "false memory syndrome" on google and you'll find plenty.
At present our society approaches child sexual abuse in a highly irrational manner. What really worries me is that this could make it *more* difficult to actually find, convict, and lock up the people who are abusing children (sexually or otherwise). Understandable or not, hysteria is rarely helpful.
As to terrorists "not playing by any rules": First off, you are incorrect, they do operate according to rules, just ones that I (and I suspect you) do not agree with. Second, even if you grant that one ought to play dirty against terrorists (since they're playing dirty as well, and lowering ourselves to their level is the correct thing to do), the real problem is you don't know who is a terrorist. If you do, you can arrest and convict them without the Patriot Act (or equivalent); if you don't, you will be targetting non-terrorists, possibly innocent civilians.
Third, and perhaps most troubling to me, when a new law restricts civil liberties, even if you trust the current government when they say "trust us, we'll only use this power against the bad guys", there is no guarantee that the next set of bastards won't reneg on that promise. People and groups in power become accustomed to the tools of power they have available and rarely, if ever, give them up without being forced to do so. That's why you keep hearing the slippery slope argument in discussions of civil liberties.
Sooner or later, someone is going to decide that GPS tracking of murderers, rapists, or other criminals who have done their time is a good idea. I have no argument with putting criminals in prison (excepting vice crimes). However, I find the idea of perpetual monitoring to be in conflict with the idea of finite prison sentences. Either keep criminals in prison (or possibly on parole) forever, or let them rejoin society without burden. At least those options are honest.