They would give every individual the same sales tax rebate yearly. Not a percentage, a fixed amount, determined by the amount you'd have to spend to live a basic but comfortable lifestyle.
Someone with a more modest lifestyle squalor might even come out ahead. Someone who spent millions would see it as a drop in the bucket. And that's the way it should be.
Re:Some would call X3 the successor...
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
I encourage you to get a BBC emulator and play it.
Elite wasn't Newtonian. It was "etheric rudder". It had a short-range FTL "warp" drive for intersystem travel. Combat and docking were like flying a plane with no gravity. Enemy ships bank, roll, and climb. The throttle control governed velocity, not acceleration. And for all that, it was notoriously difficult, particularly the fine manoeuvre of docking, but fun.
The "Frontier" sequels used Newtonian mechanics are (IMHO) much less fun to fly, because you rely so much on the autopilot for everything, because the human brain can't cope with it. (I used to play when I was 19 and my brain was educated but still young and fresh, so I don't think it's a problem with my brain per se). Combat in particular (as noted in sibling posts) wasn't much nearly as much fun either, because something going past at nearly 600km/hr[1] is too hard to hit with a laser controlled by your mouse, so you'd use the autopilot (and crash into your target, unsurprisingly), or guided missiles (boring).
[1] the relative velocity you get if two ships with 20g thrusters fire their engine for one second each while facing each other
Re:Some would call X3 the successor...
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
I think I was idealising it somewhat.. perhaps it would have been like that if it had been better balanced...
In actuality I remember pretty much what you describe.
It didn't help that most of the ships had reaction drives capable of of fairly excessive acceleration ; I think they topped out at about 12g. Again, human brains are optimized for lower accelerations. And because there was no upper limit on relative velocity, there was a lot of "jousting". And if you used the autopilot, collisions:-).
the keys are just to verify that the OS image hasn't been corrupted
A CRC or hash would be good enough for that, no cryptographic signature required.
You only sign binaries to prevent tampering.
I suspect that TI define "loading software that isn't under our control" as tampering. A lot of this probably has to do with losing the ability to differentiate between models just on the software that is loaded on them.
Re:Some would call X3 the successor...
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Indeed... and Newtonian manoeuvring just doesn't work too well in the human brain.
Movies depicting space travel with Newtonian manoeuvring are regarded as artsy. Movies with "etheric rudder" (to borrow the Star Wars term) have exciting space battles.
Battlestar Galactica (the original) used etheric rudder. The re-imaging was Newtonian, but got away with it by making things about strategy rather than tactics (and people rather than ships), and obscuring combat in a haze of gunsmoke and camera shake.
Games are the same way. Playing I-War is hard. Playing the X-Wing series isn't easy, but the curve is less steep, because it's like air combat, but the vector of gravity has been removed, simplifying the flight model.
I was certainly impressed by the Newtonian mechanics in the Frontier series, but I enjoyed the combat in Elite a lot more.
Space combat with laser weapons in a world of Newtonian mechanics just isn't interesting, because it consists of
Close to optimal range (this being close enough to be in weapons range but far away enough that your opponent can't accelerate laterally out of your weapon reticle)
Fire
Victory is entirely determined by who has the most power behind their shields and lasers. You spend the majority of your time in the early stages of Frontier avoiding combat because you'll be whiffed out of existence like a water balloon hitting the sun. Then when you have enough cash to beef up your ship, you are effectively untouchable.
Short-range particle bolt weapons and etheric rudder may not be realistic, but they are a lot more fun.
It was widely reported as "password protected". Whether that means the press (or the press office of HMRC) were dumbing it down for public consumption, or whether it was something considerably more fragile, who knows.
UK government agencies have become disproportionately paranoid about this kind of data loss now. On the upside, we now have mandatory examinations in data security. In our office, we have universal full-disk encryption and all writeable removable media is required to also be encrypted, enforced by some ghastly malware called SafeBoot. Some of the procedures and recommendations are still rather suspect.
We are recommended to destroy encrypted removable media which contained senstive data when the data is no longer required. This recommendation feels like it came from our supplier of removable media - it should be sufficient just to wipe the key block on the media. An encrypted reformat wipes the whole media, so that would put it completely beyond recovery. Instead we are being lead to destroy perfectly sound media that costs many multiples of the standard variants (because of the magic encryption hardware).
And the protocols for sending sensitive data are questionable. Approved couriers are all very well, but plaintext documents on paper are still vulnerable no matter how trustworthy a biker you entrust them to, and no matter how clearly labelled your envelopes are. Sending emails via our internal mail servers is rated "secure" but those servers are still cacheing the data as plaintext, and it's easy to slip an "outsiders" address into your CC list accidentally. I'd much rather all that was replaced by a single policy - all sensitive data that must be sent to other parties is sent to named recipients and encrypted to verified PGP keys only. This works for email regardless of the servers used and also couriers carrying optical media (for bulk data), and because it's a single thing to remember, should have a greater compliance rate.
That's actually reassuring in some ways ; it sounds as if the cryptographic components in your car keys are pretty secure. Ok, they might have been screwing you.
A shame they don't think outside the box though. They have a three-ring binder of repair procedures and they follow it.
My wife needed a new wing mirror glass, and they had to order the whole wing mirror assembly because that's the only SKU the glass came in. Bastards.
The UK and the EU have been considering this some time. There were consultation papers available on the UK Dept. of Transport website, and they noted that compatibility with a European system was required.
Our scheme was allegedly directed at improving congestion on common routes in rush hour. I estimated that using RFID tags in number plates and pickup loops on commonly congested roads would achieve that aim at a cost an order of magnitude lower than installing a GPS unit in every car, along with a cellular infrastructure to download the data.
But that's not what it's a about, is it? A fuel tax is a much better instrument, as it addresses efficiency as well as mileage. It's also cheaper to implement, and hey, already in place. Occams razor suggests that since the stated aim is addressible by much cheaper means, another aim is the true goal.
And the only other goal I can think of that's satisfied by a mandatory GPS tracker with a wireless data uplink is of course, ubiquitous surveillance of the movements of all vehicles.
I agree, but a single payer has the ability, and incentive, to effect changes.
With multiple payers, you have an enormous Mexican stand-off, with no-one willing to change the system. No-one wants to offer preventative care in case it ends up more expensive than treating the outcome. If an insurance company is being hit hard by a particular care segment, no problem, they'll just adjust their policies to stop covering it, instead of trying to prevent it.
With a single payer, responsible for all healthcare expenses, the incentive is there to try and improve long term outcomes and efficiency, because it will have to pay for todays mistakes in the future.
Alas, you get fricking stupid gaming of the system by managers trying to meet government targets (when they should just be explaining why they can't meet the target, so the system can be fixed - instead of penalizing care centres short of resources... by taking away more of their resources), but at least they are all on the same side, trying to help the patient and not trying to line their pockets (in anything more than a personal I-got-my-bonus sort of way).
At the same time, current policies mean that the government and private insurers may be spending unnecessary dollars on specialty machines
That's the point, isn't it?
On the one hand, devices have to go through insane amounts of certification to pass as an official medical device. On the other hand, I'm sure medical device manufacturers really don't want cheap (or even reasonably priced) software on commodity devices eating their lunch.
I suspect the regulations are doing their work for them, but if they weren't, they'd be colluding with the insurers to make damn sure they didn't support commodity devices.
If you have two apps, apparently equal on features, and you're looking to switch from your old application (for whatever reason), which one are you going to try out first?
The one that you can't get your data out of again?
Or the one you can?
If you don't like it, you can move on to the next one. But there's a chance you'll like the first one, you know, the one you tried first, because it was less risk.
The BBC license fee is cheap for what it is. Just because it's obligatory, people develop a false sense of expense about it.
The most basic package on Sky (our satellite TV provider) costs more than DOUBLE the license fee (including fitting in first year), and the commercial channels are full of advertisements. The BBC is commercial free and raises the quality of broadcasting as a whole in the UK.
Spotify doesn't supply as much content bandwidth as the BBC, but does let you choose from a large selection of music. That choice probably balances the fact that it's music-only.. I wonder what it would cost if it fell under the arm of the BBC? They presumably have a great deal of the infrastructure already, so that would be a reduction in overhead costs.
But it's possible to use ext2 and not lose cross-machine function ; there are filesystem drivers for Windows that are able to mount ext2. Of course, you have to pre-plan which machines you're going to use, and have administrator rights on them to install the driver, and it's not nearly as mature as the FAT32 driver is for both Linux and Windows.
So, FAT32. Shame about the filesize limits, but there you go.
I'm not saying you don't know this (I think you do), but it bears clarification for anyone who's thinking of releasing commercial Linux software (which is to be encouraged!)
The license specifically states that you can run whatever software you like on Linux. This is part of what makes it open.
GPL also states that software that runs atop APIs included with the platform need not be GPLed ; so commercial software with a proprietary license and concealed source that runs on the Linux kernel is explicitly permitted.
TomTom may wish to protect the sources of any device drivers they wrote for their hardware ; device drivers are typically derivative works of the kernel and thus covered under GPL. Not offering sources for such components (and indeed, for the base kernel they used) is naughty.
Their application and map data is not a derivative work of the kernel, and unless they are using copylefted code without letting on, should not carry any obligation to offer sources.
Sounds like something Douglas Adams would dream up.
Of course, the writers on Star Trek have been envisioning this feature for years - what other explanation do you have for all the episodes when software or other data is sent from one place to another and mysteriously lost at it's source.
The most scenarios involve the Voyager EMH.. he seems to be forever in peril disproportionate to his status as a piece of software.
Transmitted to the Alpha quadrant - why the hell can't he continue working in sickbay as well? Why does he worry about packet loss on the way?
Stolen by a visitor to the ship and a facsimile is left in his place - why not just LEAVE THE ORIGINAL DATA, they'd never have known.
It sounds like LCARS has been designed with a particularly viscous strain of DRM. Whether this has been designed into the system by Starfleet engineers or 21st century intellectual property lawyers is unknown.
Supposedly, attempting to create something perfect would be an affront to Allah, who is the only being who is perfect and who can create perfection.
Then surely the deliberate introduction of such flaws is the height of arrogance? They are assuming that they could have attained perfection, whereas even a rug that would be perfect to the human eye, is obviously little better than a puke-stained rag in the sight of Allah. He is truly merciful not to smite them most smite-ily for their presumption that they could even comprehend the nature of rug-perfection, let alone attain it!
Ah, cross-atlantic differences. This side of the ocean, only the caller pays, or I too would want a bigger plan for all the times my wife calls me wanting tech support.
If they had concentrated on reforming the patent system, instead of just bolstering their patent portfolio, they could have prevented this. But instead, they prize their own ability to do this to the little guy too highly.
They are reaping what they sowed. It doesn't make the patent troll any less despicable though.
Most of the vegetarians I've asked would eat meat that had been cloned in a vat. It would presumably be much more efficient in terms of energy than raising live animals as well, since all the energy could go into the juicy and delicious parts without wasting it on such incidentals as walking around and mooing.
Making the cow inured to pain? So the majority of people would go from not worrying one jot about how the animal feels, to.... oh. Vegetarians would probably just start to refuse to eat the meat on the grounds that it had been genetically engineered, or because of the psychological pain of being a farm animal.
Call back when you can make me a fillet steak in a vat, for a lower cost than one that used to moo. Until then... farm animals have it one heck of a lot better than equivalent wild animals. I'll keep on eating them, and I'll only feel mildly guilty about their cost in terms of resources (about 10 times the amount that vegetable sources of protein cost).
Slashdot Mirror
See FairTax
They would give every individual the same sales tax rebate yearly. Not a percentage, a fixed amount, determined by the amount you'd have to spend to live a basic but comfortable lifestyle.
Someone with a more modest lifestyle squalor might even come out ahead. Someone who spent millions would see it as a drop in the bucket. And that's the way it should be.
I encourage you to get a BBC emulator and play it.
Elite wasn't Newtonian. It was "etheric rudder". It had a short-range FTL "warp" drive for intersystem travel. Combat and docking were like flying a plane with no gravity. Enemy ships bank, roll, and climb. The throttle control governed velocity, not acceleration. And for all that, it was notoriously difficult, particularly the fine manoeuvre of docking, but fun.
The "Frontier" sequels used Newtonian mechanics are (IMHO) much less fun to fly, because you rely so much on the autopilot for everything, because the human brain can't cope with it. (I used to play when I was 19 and my brain was educated but still young and fresh, so I don't think it's a problem with my brain per se). Combat in particular (as noted in sibling posts) wasn't much nearly as much fun either, because something going past at nearly 600km/hr[1] is too hard to hit with a laser controlled by your mouse, so you'd use the autopilot (and crash into your target, unsurprisingly), or guided missiles (boring).
[1] the relative velocity you get if two ships with 20g thrusters fire their engine for one second each while facing each other
I think I was idealising it somewhat .. perhaps it would have been like that if it had been better balanced...
In actuality I remember pretty much what you describe.
It didn't help that most of the ships had reaction drives capable of of fairly excessive acceleration ; I think they topped out at about 12g. Again, human brains are optimized for lower accelerations. And because there was no upper limit on relative velocity, there was a lot of "jousting". And if you used the autopilot, collisions :-).
the keys are just to verify that the OS image hasn't been corrupted
A CRC or hash would be good enough for that, no cryptographic signature required.
You only sign binaries to prevent tampering.
I suspect that TI define "loading software that isn't under our control" as tampering. A lot of this probably has to do with losing the ability to differentiate between models just on the software that is loaded on them.
Indeed... and Newtonian manoeuvring just doesn't work too well in the human brain.
Movies depicting space travel with Newtonian manoeuvring are regarded as artsy. Movies with "etheric rudder" (to borrow the Star Wars term) have exciting space battles.
Battlestar Galactica (the original) used etheric rudder. The re-imaging was Newtonian, but got away with it by making things about strategy rather than tactics (and people rather than ships), and obscuring combat in a haze of gunsmoke and camera shake.
Games are the same way. Playing I-War is hard. Playing the X-Wing series isn't easy, but the curve is less steep, because it's like air combat, but the vector of gravity has been removed, simplifying the flight model.
I was certainly impressed by the Newtonian mechanics in the Frontier series, but I enjoyed the combat in Elite a lot more.
Space combat with laser weapons in a world of Newtonian mechanics just isn't interesting, because it consists of
Victory is entirely determined by who has the most power behind their shields and lasers. You spend the majority of your time in the early stages of Frontier avoiding combat because you'll be whiffed out of existence like a water balloon hitting the sun. Then when you have enough cash to beef up your ship, you are effectively untouchable.
Short-range particle bolt weapons and etheric rudder may not be realistic, but they are a lot more fun.
Thankfully all the data on the CDs was encrypted.
It was widely reported as "password protected". Whether that means the press (or the press office of HMRC) were dumbing it down for public consumption, or whether it was something considerably more fragile, who knows.
UK government agencies have become disproportionately paranoid about this kind of data loss now. On the upside, we now have mandatory examinations in data security. In our office, we have universal full-disk encryption and all writeable removable media is required to also be encrypted, enforced by some ghastly malware called SafeBoot. Some of the procedures and recommendations are still rather suspect.
We are recommended to destroy encrypted removable media which contained senstive data when the data is no longer required. This recommendation feels like it came from our supplier of removable media - it should be sufficient just to wipe the key block on the media. An encrypted reformat wipes the whole media, so that would put it completely beyond recovery. Instead we are being lead to destroy perfectly sound media that costs many multiples of the standard variants (because of the magic encryption hardware).
And the protocols for sending sensitive data are questionable. Approved couriers are all very well, but plaintext documents on paper are still vulnerable no matter how trustworthy a biker you entrust them to, and no matter how clearly labelled your envelopes are. Sending emails via our internal mail servers is rated "secure" but those servers are still cacheing the data as plaintext, and it's easy to slip an "outsiders" address into your CC list accidentally. I'd much rather all that was replaced by a single policy - all sensitive data that must be sent to other parties is sent to named recipients and encrypted to verified PGP keys only. This works for email regardless of the servers used and also couriers carrying optical media (for bulk data), and because it's a single thing to remember, should have a greater compliance rate.
Nope... they get an increased allocation of funds to hire more guys to handle the password resets.
Periodic password change policies are job security for IT support.
That's actually reassuring in some ways ; it sounds as if the cryptographic components in your car keys are pretty secure. Ok, they might have been screwing you.
A shame they don't think outside the box though. They have a three-ring binder of repair procedures and they follow it.
My wife needed a new wing mirror glass, and they had to order the whole wing mirror assembly because that's the only SKU the glass came in. Bastards.
The UK and the EU have been considering this some time. There were consultation papers available on the UK Dept. of Transport website, and they noted that compatibility with a European system was required.
Our scheme was allegedly directed at improving congestion on common routes in rush hour. I estimated that using RFID tags in number plates and pickup loops on commonly congested roads would achieve that aim at a cost an order of magnitude lower than installing a GPS unit in every car, along with a cellular infrastructure to download the data.
But that's not what it's a about, is it? A fuel tax is a much better instrument, as it addresses efficiency as well as mileage. It's also cheaper to implement, and hey, already in place. Occams razor suggests that since the stated aim is addressible by much cheaper means, another aim is the true goal.
And the only other goal I can think of that's satisfied by a mandatory GPS tracker with a wireless data uplink is of course, ubiquitous surveillance of the movements of all vehicles.
I agree, but a single payer has the ability, and incentive, to effect changes.
With multiple payers, you have an enormous Mexican stand-off, with no-one willing to change the system. No-one wants to offer preventative care in case it ends up more expensive than treating the outcome. If an insurance company is being hit hard by a particular care segment, no problem, they'll just adjust their policies to stop covering it, instead of trying to prevent it.
With a single payer, responsible for all healthcare expenses, the incentive is there to try and improve long term outcomes and efficiency, because it will have to pay for todays mistakes in the future.
Alas, you get fricking stupid gaming of the system by managers trying to meet government targets (when they should just be explaining why they can't meet the target, so the system can be fixed - instead of penalizing care centres short of resources... by taking away more of their resources), but at least they are all on the same side, trying to help the patient and not trying to line their pockets (in anything more than a personal I-got-my-bonus sort of way).
At the same time, current policies mean that the government and private insurers may be spending unnecessary dollars on specialty machines
That's the point, isn't it?
On the one hand, devices have to go through insane amounts of certification to pass as an official medical device. On the other hand, I'm sure medical device manufacturers really don't want cheap (or even reasonably priced) software on commodity devices eating their lunch.
I suspect the regulations are doing their work for them, but if they weren't, they'd be colluding with the insurers to make damn sure they didn't support commodity devices.
It's also good sense.
If you have two apps, apparently equal on features, and you're looking to switch from your old application (for whatever reason), which one are you going to try out first?
The one that you can't get your data out of again?
Or the one you can?
If you don't like it, you can move on to the next one. But there's a chance you'll like the first one, you know, the one you tried first, because it was less risk.
The BBC license fee is cheap for what it is. Just because it's obligatory, people develop a false sense of expense about it.
The most basic package on Sky (our satellite TV provider) costs more than DOUBLE the license fee (including fitting in first year), and the commercial channels are full of advertisements. The BBC is commercial free and raises the quality of broadcasting as a whole in the UK.
Spotify doesn't supply as much content bandwidth as the BBC, but does let you choose from a large selection of music. That choice probably balances the fact that it's music-only.. I wonder what it would cost if it fell under the arm of the BBC? They presumably have a great deal of the infrastructure already, so that would be a reduction in overhead costs.
Really? FAT32. Because it works on everything.
But it's possible to use ext2 and not lose cross-machine function ; there are filesystem drivers for Windows that are able to mount ext2. Of course, you have to pre-plan which machines you're going to use, and have administrator rights on them to install the driver, and it's not nearly as mature as the FAT32 driver is for both Linux and Windows.
So, FAT32. Shame about the filesize limits, but there you go.
USB drives might impede the pigeons flight ; I expect they used a micro-SD card.
You should buy stocks in the ones that make white paint. Painting roofs white to increase their albedo is a perfectly valid geoengineering technique.
I'm not saying you don't know this (I think you do), but it bears clarification for anyone who's thinking of releasing commercial Linux software (which is to be encouraged!)
The license specifically states that you can run whatever software you like on Linux. This is part of what makes it open.
GPL also states that software that runs atop APIs included with the platform need not be GPLed ; so commercial software with a proprietary license and concealed source that runs on the Linux kernel is explicitly permitted.
TomTom may wish to protect the sources of any device drivers they wrote for their hardware ; device drivers are typically derivative works of the kernel and thus covered under GPL. Not offering sources for such components (and indeed, for the base kernel they used) is naughty.
Their application and map data is not a derivative work of the kernel, and unless they are using copylefted code without letting on, should not carry any obligation to offer sources.
Sounds like something Douglas Adams would dream up.
Of course, the writers on Star Trek have been envisioning this feature for years - what other explanation do you have for all the episodes when software or other data is sent from one place to another and mysteriously lost at it's source.
The most scenarios involve the Voyager EMH.. he seems to be forever in peril disproportionate to his status as a piece of software.
It sounds like LCARS has been designed with a particularly viscous strain of DRM. Whether this has been designed into the system by Starfleet engineers or 21st century intellectual property lawyers is unknown.
Supposedly, attempting to create something perfect would be an affront to Allah, who is the only being who is perfect and who can create perfection.
Then surely the deliberate introduction of such flaws is the height of arrogance? They are assuming that they could have attained perfection, whereas even a rug that would be perfect to the human eye, is obviously little better than a puke-stained rag in the sight of Allah. He is truly merciful not to smite them most smite-ily for their presumption that they could even comprehend the nature of rug-perfection, let alone attain it!
redhaired hippie girlfriend who lives in a house in the country
Sign me up for Linux...
OOh, shiny... mine is already £20pcm... I wonder if they'd add a data plan to it and cut the cost, I've been due an upgrade for about 2 years.
Ah, cross-atlantic differences. This side of the ocean, only the caller pays, or I too would want a bigger plan for all the times my wife calls me wanting tech support.
I'd be happy enough with a data plan and no inclusive minutes - I make an average of about 3 seconds of calls per month.,..
If they had concentrated on reforming the patent system, instead of just bolstering their patent portfolio, they could have prevented this. But instead, they prize their own ability to do this to the little guy too highly.
They are reaping what they sowed. It doesn't make the patent troll any less despicable though.
Most of the vegetarians I've asked would eat meat that had been cloned in a vat. It would presumably be much more efficient in terms of energy than raising live animals as well, since all the energy could go into the juicy and delicious parts without wasting it on such incidentals as walking around and mooing.
Making the cow inured to pain? So the majority of people would go from not worrying one jot about how the animal feels, to.... oh. Vegetarians would probably just start to refuse to eat the meat on the grounds that it had been genetically engineered, or because of the psychological pain of being a farm animal.
Call back when you can make me a fillet steak in a vat, for a lower cost than one that used to moo. Until then... farm animals have it one heck of a lot better than equivalent wild animals. I'll keep on eating them, and I'll only feel mildly guilty about their cost in terms of resources (about 10 times the amount that vegetable sources of protein cost).