But we do - we pay in our taxes. Some people get more because they need more - this is the nature of how insurance should be. Instead, the US has a vast apparatus designed to bilk the policy holder out of payments as often as possible.
It's not that you have to somehow squeeze a heat exchanger into the reactor that does not obstruct the most powerful laser array on earth.
It's not just that you have to make a cryogenically cooled machine gun that can fire 10 pellets a second with perfect alignment.
It's not just the ammunition factory to feed a veritable machine gun firing pellets made of a gold-plated uranium casing surrounding a beryllium sphere containing the fuel.
It's producing the fuel. Tritium is one of the rarest elements on earth. I worked it out properly once ; you'd run out in about a week. And you can't jacket the reactor in lithium to make a breeder blanket because... you can't put obstructions in the way of the lasers.
It stretches the credibility far, far more than any of the alternate projects. Even the projects proposing to do proton-boron fusion sound more realistic. Even tokamak fusion sounds likely next to NIF. Yet NIF gets orders of magnitude more funding ($3.5B or more) than anything else except the tokamaks.
The only reason it gets funding is for weapons simulations.
Worker productivity has increased phenomenally over the last 50 years ; in a communist state, that productivity should be shared amongst the workers, improving the lot of everyone. In the capitalist state, the extra productivity is taken by the ruling classes.
A (highly simplistic) mental exercise - in the year 2000, the top 10% of the population of the USA held 70% of the wealth. If the remaining 90% have on average, 1 "wealth unit" each, then they have 90 wealth units, and there are a total of 300 wealth units in the economy. Therefore, if it was all equal, everyone would have 3 wealth units. Instead, the 90% have 1, and the 10% have 21 each.
Now, I'd be pretty damn happy if I was 3 times wealthier. In reality, I have a good job.. if I earned 3 times the national average salary... I'd still be pretty damn happy, it would be a 70% pay increase. My wife would earn the same money. For reference, she's a consultant oncologist.
Yes, I know this is *really* simplistic - if you put wealth in the hands of the masses, it would change the face of the market somewhat, and the prices of many goods would probably be much higher. This is really an indicator that much of the so-called "wealth" that the modern economy generates is actually just numbers on a balance sheet.
You do not need to go to a vendor to obtain a public key. What certificate vendors sell are signatures that certify your public key belongs to who it says it does. If you're prepared to trust an unencrypted fax over a public telephone line, you're probably prepared to trust that the public key someone puts up on their website is authentic.
If you really need the security though, it's much more secure to contact someone you know and trust at the target organization, and establish the fingerprint of their public key in a way that's hard to spoof. Even a phone call is probably secure enough for this purpose. Then you sign their key, with your key, to indicate that you trust it now.
If you're worried about security, an open fax machine is far more vulnerable to snooping than encrypted email. The email requires you to compromise the encryption keys. The fax just requires you to tap a phoneline, something a child with a box of crocodile clips could achieve.
The only advantages I can think of
* The dead-tree nature of fax output eliminates the ability to steal it from storage remotely - unless you just direct the data to disc, like many people have been doing for at least a decade or two. * The infrastructure of the telephone network is less promiscuous than the SMTP system, which means that only the phone company and any.gov orgs they are in bed with can snoop faxes opportunistically. On the flipside, targeted gathering of faxes is MUCH easier via PSTN by tapping a phone line.
I agree that this is not made easy, but this is mostly due to the lack of demand. PKI encrypted email is eminently superior to fax in every other way though.
Because any chance object you shine it at might reflect enough of the beam back at you to blind YOU? Or alternately, the goggles you need to protect yourself from it blunt your tactical awareness so much that you get pwned with an entrenchment tool?
There's no proof of that without a proper opthalmic examination. The thing about retinal damage, is you can't see it. Your vision routes around blind spots - you already have one in each eye, the fovea, that you are unaware of unless you make an effort to detect it.
Plus they force all the commercial broadcasters to raise their game. Without the BBC, British media would long ago have descended to the same level as the USA.
I actually think that a lack of an internet connection might be helpful, in some respects.
When I first encountered computers, they did very little that was interesting unless you engaged with the machine and learned something about how it worked. In contrast, a modern PC with an internet connection is pretty much an endless fount of effortless entertainment. My 7 year old daughter seems to do little other with it than playing Flash games. Now, some of them are educational, but I don't see any that actually teach you about the computer.
Back then of course, I would have loved an internet connection - the technical references for computers of the era was all dead-tree and sometimes very expensive. The 8-bit machines usually came with reference manuals detailing BASIC (and in the case of the BBC Micro, the assembler as well). API reference manuals for the 16-bit machines were notably NOT included. I was able to find a free C compiler, but unable to use any of the window GUI because I couldn't afford the API manuals. And the only form of comms back then were BBS systems, and slow modems on a pay-per-minute telephone system, which were just not going to happen in my house. My programming habits withered away at that point, only to be rekindled some years later when I gained employment at a software company. If I'd gotten into the C family of languages, I would speculate that my career would have been much different, and probably more lucrative.
My daughter was intrigued by the ability to have a computer repeatedly PRINT "DAD SMELLS" when I booted a BBC emulator up for her to show her the computer of my youth.. but hasn't really taken to programming yet (at the age of 7).
Contribution isn't just about programming. A feature request is contribution. Documenting how you used the software to achieve something and sharing that is contribution. Even a good clear bug report is a contribution. All of these things can make the software more useful, no programming required.
If you do cross over into the programming end of things, it's a total no brainer though. Do you want to maintain your private fork of the code with your feature in it, or do you want to hand it back to the hackers and let them make it better for you...
It would certainly be more efficient, but would take a lot of costly infrastructure to implement. What's worse, there is unlikely to be the political will to achieve this - public transport is perceived as a form of socialism in the USA.
This, on the other hand, can be done in software, using pre-existing infrastructure - many people have a smartphone. If the 20% fuel saving is consistent, many people could pay for their phone AND their network bills out of the savings they make in fuel. It's probably even worth the auto manufacturers just building it into their new model cars, for that kind of money.
I agree - it would be better to have the PRT. But this idea has much more chance of taking hold and being beneficial in the short term.
* It gives them leverage. If sex is sinful, and the only way to absolve sin is via confession, it keeps you engaged with the church.
It's no coincidence that it's something that most people are biologically wired up to do. Even *thinking* about it is deemed sinful, so you can't escape the association with confession even if you abstain.
* It gives them a justification to disapprove of contraception
Because contraception is only for the purpose of making extra-marital sex less risky, right? Oh, it's nothing to do with the fact that less contraception => more babies with Catholic parents => more Catholics.
Being able to control your fertility is one of the most basic means of promoting economic welfare. Even without the arguments for disease prevention, that should be enough to wholeheartedly endorse it. Contraception also prevents abortion, something else that the church does not like. But the church is not interested in the welfare of it's congregation - it is interested in the welfare of the church, and that means expanding it's power base with more good little Catholics.
It's also arguably becoming essential simply because the planet can't support many more of us. Opposing contraception is almost anti-green, it would be interesting to see the outcome of "The Catholic church" vs "The Greenies".
Note that I'm not implying that these decisions are conscious. They may be, but equally, Catholicism is a meme-complex that has had a long time to evolve. They may merely be memes that have the best fitness for their particular niche.
* Maybe your partner isn't faithful * Maybe one of your contracted an STD via another means (needles, blood transfusion)
And of course, the biggest * Maybe you'd like to have control over your fertility
The reason the Catholic church is opposed to condoms remains the same - there's one particular condition they DO want to promote the spread of. It's called Catholicism. The primary vector for getting it is from your parents.
Assuming the Christian beliefs about afterlife are true, which is more responsible?
Committing the sin of abortion (for which you can be forgiven according to your creed) in exchange for instant passage of the child's soul to the afterlife
OR
Putting it through a lifetime of hell because you are ill prepared to give it the start in life that it needs
You ask enough, eventually get to "point where we cannot explain".
Some people fill this void with an arbitrary explanation not limited to the involvement of a postulated deity. Some choose to let it inspire them to find out the real answer.
I wonder which one produces more truth and beauty...
There was a Cringely column a few years ago that suggested exactly the same thing - the point being that people don't interact with the kernel, they interact with the Windows shell and the programs that run atop it. His contention was that a Windows shell on Linux would free MS to direct resources at where it really mattered for their market - the consumer experience.
It's an interesting idea, but I too feel that it's unlikely to happen.
It's not that completely different - It's pretty obvious from the MOO-XML standards that the MS Office.***x formats are just an XML serialization of the existing binary formats. This does make it sufficiently similar to ODF to fool the technically naive though - hey, they're both a ZIP file full of XML, right?
The real "open" part of ODF is clarity. MOO-XML is 6000 pages long and extremely unclear. ODF is sufficiently clear that there are at least 2 open-source implementations of it.
Slashdot Mirror
But we do - we pay in our taxes. Some people get more because they need more - this is the nature of how insurance should be. Instead, the US has a vast apparatus designed to bilk the policy holder out of payments as often as possible.
It's not that you have to somehow squeeze a heat exchanger into the reactor that does not obstruct the most powerful laser array on earth.
It's not just that you have to make a cryogenically cooled machine gun that can fire 10 pellets a second with perfect alignment.
It's not just the ammunition factory to feed a veritable machine gun firing pellets made of a gold-plated uranium casing surrounding a beryllium sphere containing the fuel.
It's producing the fuel. Tritium is one of the rarest elements on earth. I worked it out properly once ; you'd run out in about a week. And you can't jacket the reactor in lithium to make a breeder blanket because ... you can't put obstructions in the way of the lasers.
It stretches the credibility far, far more than any of the alternate projects. Even the projects proposing to do proton-boron fusion sound more realistic. Even tokamak fusion sounds likely next to NIF. Yet NIF gets orders of magnitude more funding ($3.5B or more) than anything else except the tokamaks.
The only reason it gets funding is for weapons simulations.
Worker productivity has increased phenomenally over the last 50 years ; in a communist state, that productivity should be shared amongst the workers, improving the lot of everyone. In the capitalist state, the extra productivity is taken by the ruling classes.
A (highly simplistic) mental exercise - in the year 2000, the top 10% of the population of the USA held 70% of the wealth. If the remaining 90% have on average, 1 "wealth unit" each, then they have 90 wealth units, and there are a total of 300 wealth units in the economy. Therefore, if it was all equal, everyone would have 3 wealth units. Instead, the 90% have 1, and the 10% have 21 each.
Now, I'd be pretty damn happy if I was 3 times wealthier. In reality, I have a good job.. if I earned 3 times the national average salary... I'd still be pretty damn happy, it would be a 70% pay increase. My wife would earn the same money. For reference, she's a consultant oncologist.
Yes, I know this is *really* simplistic - if you put wealth in the hands of the masses, it would change the face of the market somewhat, and the prices of many goods would probably be much higher. This is really an indicator that much of the so-called "wealth" that the modern economy generates is actually just numbers on a balance sheet.
How about "My neighbour is happy, and so am I. Fuck anyone who'd want to take that from us."?
Are you Estonian?
These days one of those tools that's just a set of spring loaded rods intended to fit into any allen key style hole would do.
public key vendors
You do not need to go to a vendor to obtain a public key. What certificate vendors sell are signatures that certify your public key belongs to who it says it does. If you're prepared to trust an unencrypted fax over a public telephone line, you're probably prepared to trust that the public key someone puts up on their website is authentic.
If you really need the security though, it's much more secure to contact someone you know and trust at the target organization, and establish the fingerprint of their public key in a way that's hard to spoof. Even a phone call is probably secure enough for this purpose. Then you sign their key, with your key, to indicate that you trust it now.
If you're worried about security, an open fax machine is far more vulnerable to snooping than encrypted email. The email requires you to compromise the encryption keys. The fax just requires you to tap a phoneline, something a child with a box of crocodile clips could achieve.
The only advantages I can think of
* The dead-tree nature of fax output eliminates the ability to steal it from storage remotely - unless you just direct the data to disc, like many people have been doing for at least a decade or two. .gov orgs they are in bed with can snoop faxes opportunistically. On the flipside, targeted gathering of faxes is MUCH easier via PSTN by tapping a phone line.
* The infrastructure of the telephone network is less promiscuous than the SMTP system, which means that only the phone company and any
I agree that this is not made easy, but this is mostly due to the lack of demand. PKI encrypted email is eminently superior to fax in every other way though.
They should go the way of Estonia, where cyptographic signatures have legal weight
Because any chance object you shine it at might reflect enough of the beam back at you to blind YOU? Or alternately, the goggles you need to protect yourself from it blunt your tactical awareness so much that you get pwned with an entrenchment tool?
Yup - worse, by reckoning of the Geneva Conventions. Weapons designed to blind are banned, whereas machines guns are totally ok.
briefly and without any damage
There's no proof of that without a proper opthalmic examination. The thing about retinal damage, is you can't see it. Your vision routes around blind spots - you already have one in each eye, the fovea, that you are unaware of unless you make an effort to detect it.
Plus they force all the commercial broadcasters to raise their game. Without the BBC, British media would long ago have descended to the same level as the USA.
I actually think that a lack of an internet connection might be helpful, in some respects.
When I first encountered computers, they did very little that was interesting unless you engaged with the machine and learned something about how it worked. In contrast, a modern PC with an internet connection is pretty much an endless fount of effortless entertainment. My 7 year old daughter seems to do little other with it than playing Flash games. Now, some of them are educational, but I don't see any that actually teach you about the computer.
Back then of course, I would have loved an internet connection - the technical references for computers of the era was all dead-tree and sometimes very expensive. The 8-bit machines usually came with reference manuals detailing BASIC (and in the case of the BBC Micro, the assembler as well). API reference manuals for the 16-bit machines were notably NOT included. I was able to find a free C compiler, but unable to use any of the window GUI because I couldn't afford the API manuals. And the only form of comms back then were BBS systems, and slow modems on a pay-per-minute telephone system, which were just not going to happen in my house. My programming habits withered away at that point, only to be rekindled some years later when I gained employment at a software company. If I'd gotten into the C family of languages, I would speculate that my career would have been much different, and probably more lucrative.
My daughter was intrigued by the ability to have a computer repeatedly PRINT "DAD SMELLS" when I booted a BBC emulator up for her to show her the computer of my youth.. but hasn't really taken to programming yet (at the age of 7).
Yeah, you were one digit off a palindromic UID. You must have been gutted.
Staple a wiimote to it.
It's an iPad? In a wipe-clean cover?
The joke runs that tech companies generally sell products in the UK for the same number of GBP as they sell them for in USD.
It's not entirely true anymore... but it's still not parity with exchange rates
32GB iPod Touch 4th generation (Amazon .com / .co.uk prices, Amazon's own, not resellers)
* USA - $275
* UK - £225 ( $365 )
Buffalo Ministation 500GB
* USA - $53
* UK - £42 ( $68 )
Now, our prices include sales tax of 20%, and I'm aware that the US ones may not - but even accounting for that, it still looks pretty bad...
Contribution isn't just about programming. A feature request is contribution. Documenting how you used the software to achieve something and sharing that is contribution. Even a good clear bug report is a contribution. All of these things can make the software more useful, no programming required.
If you do cross over into the programming end of things, it's a total no brainer though. Do you want to maintain your private fork of the code with your feature in it, or do you want to hand it back to the hackers and let them make it better for you...
It would certainly be more efficient, but would take a lot of costly infrastructure to implement. What's worse, there is unlikely to be the political will to achieve this - public transport is perceived as a form of socialism in the USA.
This, on the other hand, can be done in software, using pre-existing infrastructure - many people have a smartphone. If the 20% fuel saving is consistent, many people could pay for their phone AND their network bills out of the savings they make in fuel. It's probably even worth the auto manufacturers just building it into their new model cars, for that kind of money.
I agree - it would be better to have the PRT. But this idea has much more chance of taking hold and being beneficial in the short term.
The Catholic church preaches abstinence because
* It gives them leverage. If sex is sinful, and the only way to absolve sin is via confession, it keeps you engaged with the church.
It's no coincidence that it's something that most people are biologically wired up to do. Even *thinking* about it is deemed sinful, so you can't escape the association with confession even if you abstain.
* It gives them a justification to disapprove of contraception
Because contraception is only for the purpose of making extra-marital sex less risky, right? Oh, it's nothing to do with the fact that less contraception => more babies with Catholic parents => more Catholics.
Being able to control your fertility is one of the most basic means of promoting economic welfare. Even without the arguments for disease prevention, that should be enough to wholeheartedly endorse it. Contraception also prevents abortion, something else that the church does not like. But the church is not interested in the welfare of it's congregation - it is interested in the welfare of the church, and that means expanding it's power base with more good little Catholics.
It's also arguably becoming essential simply because the planet can't support many more of us. Opposing contraception is almost anti-green, it would be interesting to see the outcome of "The Catholic church" vs "The Greenies".
Note that I'm not implying that these decisions are conscious. They may be, but equally, Catholicism is a meme-complex that has had a long time to evolve. They may merely be memes that have the best fitness for their particular niche.
Ok..
* Maybe your partner isn't faithful
* Maybe one of your contracted an STD via another means (needles, blood transfusion)
And of course, the biggest
* Maybe you'd like to have control over your fertility
The reason the Catholic church is opposed to condoms remains the same - there's one particular condition they DO want to promote the spread of. It's called Catholicism. The primary vector for getting it is from your parents.
Assuming the Christian beliefs about afterlife are true, which is more responsible?
Committing the sin of abortion (for which you can be forgiven according to your creed) in exchange for instant passage of the child's soul to the afterlife
OR
Putting it through a lifetime of hell because you are ill prepared to give it the start in life that it needs
You ask enough, eventually get to "point where we cannot explain".
Some people fill this void with an arbitrary explanation not limited to the involvement of a postulated deity. Some choose to let it inspire them to find out the real answer.
I wonder which one produces more truth and beauty...
There was a Cringely column a few years ago that suggested exactly the same thing - the point being that people don't interact with the kernel, they interact with the Windows shell and the programs that run atop it. His contention was that a Windows shell on Linux would free MS to direct resources at where it really mattered for their market - the consumer experience.
It's an interesting idea, but I too feel that it's unlikely to happen.
It's not that completely different - It's pretty obvious from the MOO-XML standards that the MS Office .***x formats are just an XML serialization of the existing binary formats. This does make it sufficiently similar to ODF to fool the technically naive though - hey, they're both a ZIP file full of XML, right?
The real "open" part of ODF is clarity. MOO-XML is 6000 pages long and extremely unclear. ODF is sufficiently clear that there are at least 2 open-source implementations of it.