I think the comment about "free" was linked to the fact that we didn't do the work to capture the energy ; the consensus theory is that an enormous number of deceased organisms did the work for us.
Yes, there is a cost associated with extraction and refinement, but the energy balance is overwhelmingly positive with fossil fuel. For each unit of energy you spend, you get at least 6 back (historically this has been higher).
Compare this to one of the worst biofuel cases, corn ethanol, which yields 1.3 units of energy for every unit you spend making it.
So that's +500% vs +30% - the fossil oil is 16 times more profitable.
Fossil fuels are an enormous free-ride - Because the ancient ecosystem did all the work of absorbing the solar energy and carbon, we are essentially mooching off the efforts of past epochs of lifeforms.
Alternative forms of energy gathering are expensive because you have to pay for them to be built now and the energy profit comes in the future. Fossil fuels are cheap because all the energy gathering is already done.
The problem with that high profit ratio is that it won't last. It used to be 1 to 30 ; it's dropping like a stone. When you see an announcement that a "new oil reserve" has come on line these days it's often not that a new oil discovery has been made - it's just that the price of oil has gone up so much that reserves that were previously uneconomical to extract are now viable.
Of course, if 100% of North America was wind powered.. well, I'd consider it staggeringly unlikely that the entire place suffered from a sudden loss of wind simultaneously. If you build enough overcapacity to cover the average generation capacity of calm spots, and make sure your wind farms are tied into the grid, you have a solution that can maintain power for everyone. Which is one of the reasons you have an electricity grid anyway.
So yes, you could have 100% wind power across the nation, without blackouts.
Any meteorologists want to point out any gaping flaws in my assertion?
The only way to get locally installable documentation is in fact either to buy Visual Studio, or get an MSDN Library subscription Completely untrue. Microsoft have allowed free downloads of the full MSDN Library disk image since May 2006.
The Express editions of Visual Studio are quite usable. SharpDevelop is also very good. As another poster points out, you could get away with developing with a text editor because the compiler is in the framework, and the required tools are in the (free) SDK.
The "Pro" editions of VS give you the following three things
* The ability to have project groups consisting of mixed project languages
* Additional code templates
* The ability to run plugins
Of those three, the third is the most useful, but none of them are essential. You can write code that does anything the.NET framework can achieve with Notepad. $1200 is probably a good price for VS Pro though.
Of course, your MSDN license does cover the ability to develop against virtually any product that MS makes. If that's your bag, that's very useful.
And I completely agree about version control. I wouldn't touch TFS with a bargepole, despite any of the good things I've heard about it, firstly because it's a closed-source product and I don't want my source history locked up in a database which I can't read the source for, secondly because I still have the emotional scars from having to administer a VSS repository. For the first reason, I also do not recommend any other proprietary VCS. I recommend SVN, although I'm rapidly becoming very fond of Bazaar.
If you're happy with your keyboard, all power to your wrist.
I've used both expensive and cheap keyboards and there is no way I would voluntarily go back to the cheap ones. I find the smushy rubbery feel of membrane based keyboards horrible, not only that, because they lack positive physical feedback when you have made a key "hit", you are forced to rely on either i) overpressure on the key to make sure you hit or ii) typing more slowly (because the eye-hand reflex arc is much longer than the hand-hand reflex arc). Most users rely on overpressure, putting extra strain on the joints and tendons.
As an example, my dear old mum is a professional typist. For some years she has been suffering from arthritis of the fingers. Until recently, she was typing on the standard POS membrane keyboard shipped with her desktop. I sent her a decent mechanical keyboard and her arthritis was significantly better within a few weeks.
For those of us that use the keyboard mostly as a gamepad, perhaps it's not worth it. But for those of us that type a large amount of text every day, I always recommend either an old Model M, a Unicomp customizer, or a Cherry G80-3000. No frills, just very good keyswitches.
These things usually store a list rather than generate random passwords. Not true ; the numbers are generated algorithmically. The device has a clock and a known seed value, and continuously generates a new key every 30-60 seconds.
Of course, the upside to using plants rather than solar cells, is that plants build themselves, and also make more plant factories, called "seeds" as they do it.
.. using TrueCrypt. Make sure it's as tame as possible ; you don't want to be banged up for contravening local decency laws.
When asked, provide the key, but act embarrassed. Explain that you keep it in an encrypted partition to hide it from your wife, and from your corporate IT department.
Keep the real data in the TrueCrypt hidden volume inside the pr0n.
Using pr0n gives you several advantages:-
* It's a highly plausible excuse for having an encrypted partition.
* It's a highly plausible excuse for having a large encrypted partition. If you have a lot of confidential data, this is important - it's not good enough to just have a few innocuous spreadsheets with your tax receipts in there ; someone may spot that you have rather more room than you really need. A pr0n partition needs to be large, and needs room to grow because you're gonna be download more pr0n, right?
* Male customs inspectors will be distracted.
* Female customs inspectors will write you off as a harmless creep. AND
* You have something to do in the hotel.
The gmail revenue stream depends on targeted advertising, which means they need to have a daemon read your mail. If they supported encryption as standard, they'd be cutting off some not-insignificant portion of that revenue ; regardless of how much they'd like to support the feature, their responsibilities are to their shareholders ; unless they can find a way of making equivalent or greater revenue from encrypted mail, they can't field it as a feature.
I can't envisage an encrypted mail service that has an externalized revenue source, so the only way to fund it is by the customer paying. Which then begs the question, who do you trust enough to pay them to keep your secrets safe? In my case, I no secrets worth keeping, but if I did, I wouldn't trust anyone else to keep them for me.
Open-source, peer-reviewed encryption, under my own control, is the only technique I would trust to keep digital secrets transmitted across a wire.
The best kept secrets are of course the ones you keep solely in your own head.
It's less of a problem with Linux, even if, as you say, having access to the source makes it easier to craft your exploit.
First, GNU/Linux users tend to be much more security aware than your average Windows user. Let's assume that will change as the market share increases, but for now, it's true.
Second, the design of GNU/Linux operating systems is inherently more secure. Fewer things run in ring 0. It's harder to get users to run anything, as you specifically need to set the executable bit.
Third, the very thing that makes it easier to devise exploits for GNU/Linux..... makes it easier to devise exploits - and fix them, sometimes even before they are a part of the OS.
Fourth, GNU/Linux systems are not all the same. As other people point out, the reason that Windows gets attacked, is that Windows has 90% of the desktop share. Even if everyone was running a GNU/Linux distribution, they wouldn't all be running the same OS.
Fifth, out of the box, Windows runs many more services than GNU/Linux, especially network services. This is the reason for the "13 seconds" pwnage time typically quoted for an unpatched Windows machine connected to the naked network. Some of these services cannot be turned off without the OS ceasing to function properly. It's best to keep Windows behind a firewall - but the very segment of the public that is most vulnerable is the segment least likely to be behind one.
Sixth (and on the same kind of topic), Windows installation disks are typically not re-mastered and printed except for major service packs, and you can't typically download a burn a new install disk, even after service packs become available. The service packs are large, so they offer a large window for infection while they download.
(perhaps Windows could do with a "patch" mode, where it only allows network connections to MS patch servers with the appropriate certificates, to be activated whenever there are outstanding patches and it's naked on the internet).
GNU/Linux distributions are often in a similar boat though ; but their major releases are usually free to download and burn, so you always have the most recent "major" install disk. Many distributions have utilities that will prepare you an "all-in-one" up to date installer. Such things are also available for Windows, but again, on average, much less likely to be used.
If you ask me, the plot is ripe for a twist ; Stark discovers that Stane is actually the good guy, and that the massed legions of commercial software are colluding with the hardware manufacturers in a plan to take over the worlds computers by putting secret encryption keys on the motherboards and only permitting "approved" software to run.
Getting DVD and audio to work? My media player asked if I wanted it to work, and behold, after I ticked and clicked, it did.
Printer? A little research on http://linuxprinting.org/ another tick'n'click, and a setup wizard, and I was printing too.
Perhaps Tony Stark sponsors Ubuntu?
(oh, and any corporation mad enough to allow it's users to watch movies at work has more productivity worries than whether they have the right codecs installed or not).
50Mbps which gets down to 2Mbps after you use it for 10 minutes?... You're not being entirely fair. This only occurs during peak hours (1600 - 2100), if you're maxing out your connection for those 10 minutes.
Faced with the prospect of a (small) horde of P2P users ruining the service for all their other users, Virgin have implemented what has to be one of the most fair and lenient ways of spreading the load, by limiting the impact that the minority has during the period when the segment of their customer base that is least likely to be understanding about a poor connection is online.
For the remaining 19 hours of the day you are free to exercise your bandwidth to it's limit. Bear in mind that 50Mbit/s is equivalent to at least 4 simultaneous broadcast quality DVB-T channels - if you can't pull in enough content to satisfy you across that kind of bandwidth, you either have serious ADD, or you're a warez duplicator.
ASDL ISPs in the UK typically cap your monthly download bandwidth instead, which isn't nearly as fair (doesn't address the real problem of peak-time congestion), or as useful - a 5 hour throttle down to 2MBit/s isn't nearly as painful as having your connection choked to sub-modem speeds for the rest of the month.
Unless you have a business need for that much bandwidth, in which case you shouldn't be using a residential ISP service.
Yes, it would be great if they had enough capacity to serve everyone at full speed all the time. It would be great if their marketing wasn't misleading about speed. But frankly, if you're a technically adept user you should appreciate the difficulty of providing all-you-can-eat bandwidth, and you should take marketing with a pinch of salt.
I initially found it a pain in the ass too, then I just changed my habits, queued downloads for after 2100, etc. I also took a deep breath and remembered that even when my connection was throttled, it was still 180 times faster than the crappy old 56k modem I used to use.
No it doesn't. It doesn't support the firewall requirement ; as the GP poster said.
For those not familiar, this requires that your VPN client firewalls itself off from its local network and only participates as a network node in the VPN.
The Linux client doesn't support this. This is presumably because if you have source that supports it (your reply seems to indicate that you have source for the base client, but AFAIK it doesn't include this feature), you could compile a client which claimed it complied, but didn't. Or because the user has so much control over a Linux environment that Cisco doesn't feel safe claiming that it could.
The only way you can assure the firewall requirement is in place is with a closed binary, preferably cryptographically signed, running in a closed environment. AKA, Windows.
Personally, I find the firewall requirement deeply frustrating, because it prevents you from using your locally networked resources ; you might have a printer, a gateway that's faster than using a remote gateway over VPN, etc. But I can understand it, because the administrators who enable it have obviously learned the hard way (or just heard tales from those who have) - Windows is not a secure network OS, and they have to defend their networks from people ill-informed enough to put Windows on a naked internet connection.
MS can't own ODF. They may gain control over a body that approves of ODF as a standard. They may be able to tell that body to change what it claims to the standard. But the all the authors of ODF have to do is publicly announce that they no longer consider the ISO accreditation of ODF to be valid. The OOo team sure as hell won't write anything into the OOo ODF filter if it serves MS (and only MS).
I think it's more likely that the effect is that people who spend a substantial fraction of their budget on a substance are more likely to buy less of that substance, simply because their purchase habits are constrained by their budget.
I like beer, but I rarely drink more than one or two, and that infrequently. The price of beer bothers me very little because my income is greater than my outgoings. I tend to buy "premium" brands because the flavour is just as important as the pharmaceutical effect of the alcohol to me.
An alcoholic is likely to be buying alcohol up to the limits of his budget. This is borne out by the stereotypical brands that alcoholics buy ; brands with high alcohol content for their price and other considerations are secondary. If you then make alcohol more expensive, the alcoholic is either forced to raise his income, reduce his drinking, or drink something more economical (if he is not already at the bottom of the scale).
The budget of addicts is likely to be relatively steady, even petty criminal activities are unlikely to give richer pickings when prices increase. The opposite trend is more likely ; people have less in their wallets because of their increased grocery bills, and the ever-decreasing purchase price of white goods is reflected in a reduced price for stolen white goods.
Therefore price increases in the chosen substances of addicts are highly likely to reduce consumption, although they will have little short term effect on the desire for the substance itself.
carbon sinking is not even possible given the engineering capacity we as humans have That's why you use the engineering capacity that photosynthetic lifeforms have.
You can sink a heck of a lot of carbon by growing and cutting timber.
Your requirement for all carbon-based fuel to be carbon neutral would be completely satisfied by requiring all biofuel projects to themselves be fuelled 100% by biofuels. At present, you can say "we replaced N gallons of fossil fuel with biofuels!", and it looks great as a statistic but hides the fact that a substantial fraction of N was spent as fossil fuels in the production process.
Compared to the rest of your proposals, the following is a drop in the bucket, but could potentially yield the best results ;
Invest heavily in all nuclear fusion energy projects, not just the current tokamak projects.
I don't mean "heavy" in the same way as the current multi-billion dollar investment in tokamak fusion projects like ITER. I mean on the order of a few measly tens of millions for each alternate project ; a sum that could probably be recovered by trivial improvements in efficiency on "heavy" fusion projects.
At the worst, you'll keep a few layabouts and crackpots from bothering the real scientists. At best, you could end up with a workable prototype within a decade.
To my mind, one of these alternate projects would seem to be more elegant and viable than any of the others - focus fusion. I can see reasons why it wouldn't attract commercial funding, largely because if it worked it would produce dinky little power stations that churn out electricity very cheaply. Big Energy likes large capital projects ; these things would probably only cost a few million apiece. Brownouts would be easy to address ; just drop more stations into affected areas until the demand is met. Localised spikes could be ironed out more effectively by sharing across a distributed electricity grid that has far more "supplier" nodes. And the regular maintenance of the reactor appears to be as simple sending a couple of engineers in every 2-3 months to swap out a set of electrodes. Radioactive waste is projected to be limited to "the same radioactive content as a classful of schoolchildren".
Yes, it's a gamble, but given the stakes that are already being played with, it's a small side-bet that would pay off big-time if it came through.
trivial to build a PC "board" Maybe for a 286, or a BBC Micro or something. Last time I looked, modern motherboards have up to six layers of printed circuits.
I believe him ; my IT department is so lame that I had to wait 13 weeks for a piece of software, just because it wasn't sold by one of their "approved software agents". I think in the end they got one of their software agents to act as a middleman, buying it from the real source and selling it on to them (with a markup).
In the meantime, I'd made significant inroads into the work that the software was supposed to save me from having to do manually.
And the financial year had also ended, meaning that the cost was deducted from this years budget, instead of last years.
the name of the default profile location varies by locale.
And by OS, on Vista it's mercifully changed to "C:\Users"
But this is why you don't use a string literal, you call one of the kernel functions designed to return the location, or expand the USERPROFILE environment variable. Rather like just using the '~' path on Linux.
Aside from the lack of a third pair of legs, the combinations of a pair of panniers at the front that look like a pair of compound eyes, the black colour scheme, the shape of its legs, and the incessant buzzing the thing emits, all came together and made me think of Brundlefly.
Creepy. But obviously highly sophisticated (or they found a simple rule and implemented it well).
What exactly could I, as a member of the voting populous, do to ensure that a pen and paper system hasn't been somehow gamed?
Keep in mind that, as with any complex system, the human side of the equation (such as operating and oversight procedures) are just as important as the technical side. Yes, it is possible to create a secure voting system, but the problem is it would involve strong crypto and as such it would be understood by only a few people. Oversight would be difficult even for those experts because even experts have trouble counting electron pulses bouncing around a slip of silicon every few nanoseconds.
A paper ballot system has the advantage of being comprehensible to even those of average intelligence, visible, and simple. And thus it's much harder to subvert if you have transparency about your procedures and access to all participants. It scales easily with the task (the same small fraction of the population should serve any size of election), and compared to the importance of the data being counted, the additional wait for a manual count is of limited importance.
Electronic financial systems work well because both parties have an interest in the transaction being kocher. Electoral systems have no such balance ; if the system in your area has been bought, the interest is all with the buyer. With a paper system, for each person involved in the process, you have another chance that subversion will be both detected and reported. With a computer system, the pool of people able to even detect fraud is minimal, and well known (and thus much easier to target for bribes, threats, whatever).
I love computers. I get to tinker with them for a living. But they have no place in a transparent democratic electoral process.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the comment about "free" was linked to the fact that we didn't do the work to capture the energy ; the consensus theory is that an enormous number of deceased organisms did the work for us.
Yes, there is a cost associated with extraction and refinement, but the energy balance is overwhelmingly positive with fossil fuel. For each unit of energy you spend, you get at least 6 back (historically this has been higher).
Compare this to one of the worst biofuel cases, corn ethanol, which yields 1.3 units of energy for every unit you spend making it.
So that's +500% vs +30% - the fossil oil is 16 times more profitable.
Fossil fuels are an enormous free-ride - Because the ancient ecosystem did all the work of absorbing the solar energy and carbon, we are essentially mooching off the efforts of past epochs of lifeforms.
Alternative forms of energy gathering are expensive because you have to pay for them to be built now and the energy profit comes in the future. Fossil fuels are cheap because all the energy gathering is already done.
The problem with that high profit ratio is that it won't last. It used to be 1 to 30 ; it's dropping like a stone. When you see an announcement that a "new oil reserve" has come on line these days it's often not that a new oil discovery has been made - it's just that the price of oil has gone up so much that reserves that were previously uneconomical to extract are now viable.
Of course, if 100% of North America was wind powered .. well, I'd consider it staggeringly unlikely that the entire place suffered from a sudden loss of wind simultaneously. If you build enough overcapacity to cover the average generation capacity of calm spots, and make sure your wind farms are tied into the grid, you have a solution that can maintain power for everyone. Which is one of the reasons you have an electricity grid anyway.
So yes, you could have 100% wind power across the nation, without blackouts.
Any meteorologists want to point out any gaping flaws in my assertion?
They don't need to handle it reliably ; just long enough to fritz the delicate sensitive electronics in a modem.
The Express editions of Visual Studio are quite usable. SharpDevelop is also very good. As another poster points out, you could get away with developing with a text editor because the compiler is in the framework, and the required tools are in the (free) SDK.
The "Pro" editions of VS give you the following three things
* The ability to have project groups consisting of mixed project languages
* Additional code templates
* The ability to run plugins
Of those three, the third is the most useful, but none of them are essential. You can write code that does anything the
Of course, your MSDN license does cover the ability to develop against virtually any product that MS makes. If that's your bag, that's very useful.
And I completely agree about version control. I wouldn't touch TFS with a bargepole, despite any of the good things I've heard about it, firstly because it's a closed-source product and I don't want my source history locked up in a database which I can't read the source for, secondly because I still have the emotional scars from having to administer a VSS repository. For the first reason, I also do not recommend any other proprietary VCS. I recommend SVN, although I'm rapidly becoming very fond of Bazaar.
If you're happy with your keyboard, all power to your wrist.
I've used both expensive and cheap keyboards and there is no way I would voluntarily go back to the cheap ones. I find the smushy rubbery feel of membrane based keyboards horrible, not only that, because they lack positive physical feedback when you have made a key "hit", you are forced to rely on either i) overpressure on the key to make sure you hit or ii) typing more slowly (because the eye-hand reflex arc is much longer than the hand-hand reflex arc). Most users rely on overpressure, putting extra strain on the joints and tendons.
As an example, my dear old mum is a professional typist. For some years she has been suffering from arthritis of the fingers. Until recently, she was typing on the standard POS membrane keyboard shipped with her desktop. I sent her a decent mechanical keyboard and her arthritis was significantly better within a few weeks.
For those of us that use the keyboard mostly as a gamepad, perhaps it's not worth it. But for those of us that type a large amount of text every day, I always recommend either an old Model M, a Unicomp customizer, or a Cherry G80-3000. No frills, just very good keyswitches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecureID
The math sayeth ; you are wrong.
:-)
Mathematics are about the one part we can have certainty in.
Nothing can crack a one-time pad ; not a real one with proper random numbers. Not even a quantum computer could do it.
Other than that, a nice poem
Of course, the upside to using plants rather than solar cells, is that plants build themselves, and also make more plant factories, called "seeds" as they do it.
.. using TrueCrypt. Make sure it's as tame as possible ; you don't want to be banged up for contravening local decency laws.
:-
When asked, provide the key, but act embarrassed. Explain that you keep it in an encrypted partition to hide it from your wife, and from your corporate IT department.
Keep the real data in the TrueCrypt hidden volume inside the pr0n.
Using pr0n gives you several advantages
* It's a highly plausible excuse for having an encrypted partition.
* It's a highly plausible excuse for having a large encrypted partition. If you have a lot of confidential data, this is important - it's not good enough to just have a few innocuous spreadsheets with your tax receipts in there ; someone may spot that you have rather more room than you really need. A pr0n partition needs to be large, and needs room to grow because you're gonna be download more pr0n, right?
* Male customs inspectors will be distracted.
* Female customs inspectors will write you off as a harmless creep.
AND
* You have something to do in the hotel.
The gmail revenue stream depends on targeted advertising, which means they need to have a daemon read your mail. If they supported encryption as standard, they'd be cutting off some not-insignificant portion of that revenue ; regardless of how much they'd like to support the feature, their responsibilities are to their shareholders ; unless they can find a way of making equivalent or greater revenue from encrypted mail, they can't field it as a feature.
I can't envisage an encrypted mail service that has an externalized revenue source, so the only way to fund it is by the customer paying. Which then begs the question, who do you trust enough to pay them to keep your secrets safe? In my case, I no secrets worth keeping, but if I did, I wouldn't trust anyone else to keep them for me.
Open-source, peer-reviewed encryption, under my own control, is the only technique I would trust to keep digital secrets transmitted across a wire.
The best kept secrets are of course the ones you keep solely in your own head.
It's less of a problem with Linux, even if, as you say, having access to the source makes it easier to craft your exploit.
..... makes it easier to devise exploits - and fix them, sometimes even before they are a part of the OS.
First, GNU/Linux users tend to be much more security aware than your average Windows user. Let's assume that will change as the market share increases, but for now, it's true.
Second, the design of GNU/Linux operating systems is inherently more secure. Fewer things run in ring 0. It's harder to get users to run anything, as you specifically need to set the executable bit.
Third, the very thing that makes it easier to devise exploits for GNU/Linux
Fourth, GNU/Linux systems are not all the same. As other people point out, the reason that Windows gets attacked, is that Windows has 90% of the desktop share. Even if everyone was running a GNU/Linux distribution, they wouldn't all be running the same OS.
Fifth, out of the box, Windows runs many more services than GNU/Linux, especially network services. This is the reason for the "13 seconds" pwnage time typically quoted for an unpatched Windows machine connected to the naked network. Some of these services cannot be turned off without the OS ceasing to function properly. It's best to keep Windows behind a firewall - but the very segment of the public that is most vulnerable is the segment least likely to be behind one.
Sixth (and on the same kind of topic), Windows installation disks are typically not re-mastered and printed except for major service packs, and you can't typically download a burn a new install disk, even after service packs become available. The service packs are large, so they offer a large window for infection while they download.
(perhaps Windows could do with a "patch" mode, where it only allows network connections to MS patch servers with the appropriate certificates, to be activated whenever there are outstanding patches and it's naked on the internet).
GNU/Linux distributions are often in a similar boat though ; but their major releases are usually free to download and burn, so you always have the most recent "major" install disk. Many distributions have utilities that will prepare you an "all-in-one" up to date installer. Such things are also available for Windows, but again, on average, much less likely to be used.
If you ask me, the plot is ripe for a twist ; Stark discovers that Stane is actually the good guy, and that the massed legions of commercial software are colluding with the hardware manufacturers in a plan to take over the worlds computers by putting secret encryption keys on the motherboards and only permitting "approved" software to run.
Hmm.
Getting DVD and audio to work? My media player asked if I wanted it to work, and behold, after I ticked and clicked, it did.
Printer? A little research on http://linuxprinting.org/ another tick'n'click, and a setup wizard, and I was printing too.
Perhaps Tony Stark sponsors Ubuntu?
(oh, and any corporation mad enough to allow it's users to watch movies at work has more productivity worries than whether they have the right codecs installed or not).
Faced with the prospect of a (small) horde of P2P users ruining the service for all their other users, Virgin have implemented what has to be one of the most fair and lenient ways of spreading the load, by limiting the impact that the minority has during the period when the segment of their customer base that is least likely to be understanding about a poor connection is online.
For the remaining 19 hours of the day you are free to exercise your bandwidth to it's limit. Bear in mind that 50Mbit/s is equivalent to at least 4 simultaneous broadcast quality DVB-T channels - if you can't pull in enough content to satisfy you across that kind of bandwidth, you either have serious ADD, or you're a warez duplicator.
ASDL ISPs in the UK typically cap your monthly download bandwidth instead, which isn't nearly as fair (doesn't address the real problem of peak-time congestion), or as useful - a 5 hour throttle down to 2MBit/s isn't nearly as painful as having your connection choked to sub-modem speeds for the rest of the month.
Unless you have a business need for that much bandwidth, in which case you shouldn't be using a residential ISP service.
Yes, it would be great if they had enough capacity to serve everyone at full speed all the time. It would be great if their marketing wasn't misleading about speed. But frankly, if you're a technically adept user you should appreciate the difficulty of providing all-you-can-eat bandwidth, and you should take marketing with a pinch of salt.
I initially found it a pain in the ass too, then I just changed my habits, queued downloads for after 2100, etc. I also took a deep breath and remembered that even when my connection was throttled, it was still 180 times faster than the crappy old 56k modem I used to use.
No it doesn't. It doesn't support the firewall requirement ; as the GP poster said.
For those not familiar, this requires that your VPN client firewalls itself off from its local network and only participates as a network node in the VPN.
The Linux client doesn't support this. This is presumably because if you have source that supports it (your reply seems to indicate that you have source for the base client, but AFAIK it doesn't include this feature), you could compile a client which claimed it complied, but didn't. Or because the user has so much control over a Linux environment that Cisco doesn't feel safe claiming that it could.
The only way you can assure the firewall requirement is in place is with a closed binary, preferably cryptographically signed, running in a closed environment. AKA, Windows.
Personally, I find the firewall requirement deeply frustrating, because it prevents you from using your locally networked resources ; you might have a printer, a gateway that's faster than using a remote gateway over VPN, etc. But I can understand it, because the administrators who enable it have obviously learned the hard way (or just heard tales from those who have) - Windows is not a secure network OS, and they have to defend their networks from people ill-informed enough to put Windows on a naked internet connection.
MS can't own ODF. They may gain control over a body that approves of ODF as a standard. They may be able to tell that body to change what it claims to the standard. But the all the authors of ODF have to do is publicly announce that they no longer consider the ISO accreditation of ODF to be valid. The OOo team sure as hell won't write anything into the OOo ODF filter if it serves MS (and only MS).
I think it's more likely that the effect is that people who spend a substantial fraction of their budget on a substance are more likely to buy less of that substance, simply because their purchase habits are constrained by their budget.
I like beer, but I rarely drink more than one or two, and that infrequently. The price of beer bothers me very little because my income is greater than my outgoings. I tend to buy "premium" brands because the flavour is just as important as the pharmaceutical effect of the alcohol to me.
An alcoholic is likely to be buying alcohol up to the limits of his budget. This is borne out by the stereotypical brands that alcoholics buy ; brands with high alcohol content for their price and other considerations are secondary. If you then make alcohol more expensive, the alcoholic is either forced to raise his income, reduce his drinking, or drink something more economical (if he is not already at the bottom of the scale).
The budget of addicts is likely to be relatively steady, even petty criminal activities are unlikely to give richer pickings when prices increase. The opposite trend is more likely ; people have less in their wallets because of their increased grocery bills, and the ever-decreasing purchase price of white goods is reflected in a reduced price for stolen white goods.
Therefore price increases in the chosen substances of addicts are highly likely to reduce consumption, although they will have little short term effect on the desire for the substance itself.
You can sink a heck of a lot of carbon by growing and cutting timber.
Your requirement for all carbon-based fuel to be carbon neutral would be completely satisfied by requiring all biofuel projects to themselves be fuelled 100% by biofuels. At present, you can say "we replaced N gallons of fossil fuel with biofuels!", and it looks great as a statistic but hides the fact that a substantial fraction of N was spent as fossil fuels in the production process.
Compared to the rest of your proposals, the following is a drop in the bucket, but could potentially yield the best results ;
Invest heavily in all nuclear fusion energy projects, not just the current tokamak projects.
I don't mean "heavy" in the same way as the current multi-billion dollar investment in tokamak fusion projects like ITER. I mean on the order of a few measly tens of millions for each alternate project ; a sum that could probably be recovered by trivial improvements in efficiency on "heavy" fusion projects.
At the worst, you'll keep a few layabouts and crackpots from bothering the real scientists. At best, you could end up with a workable prototype within a decade.
To my mind, one of these alternate projects would seem to be more elegant and viable than any of the others - focus fusion. I can see reasons why it wouldn't attract commercial funding, largely because if it worked it would produce dinky little power stations that churn out electricity very cheaply. Big Energy likes large capital projects ; these things would probably only cost a few million apiece. Brownouts would be easy to address ; just drop more stations into affected areas until the demand is met. Localised spikes could be ironed out more effectively by sharing across a distributed electricity grid that has far more "supplier" nodes. And the regular maintenance of the reactor appears to be as simple sending a couple of engineers in every 2-3 months to swap out a set of electrodes. Radioactive waste is projected to be limited to "the same radioactive content as a classful of schoolchildren".
Yes, it's a gamble, but given the stakes that are already being played with, it's a small side-bet that would pay off big-time if it came through.
I believe him ; my IT department is so lame that I had to wait 13 weeks for a piece of software, just because it wasn't sold by one of their "approved software agents". I think in the end they got one of their software agents to act as a middleman, buying it from the real source and selling it on to them (with a markup).
In the meantime, I'd made significant inroads into the work that the software was supposed to save me from having to do manually.
And the financial year had also ended, meaning that the cost was deducted from this years budget, instead of last years.
And by OS, on Vista it's mercifully changed to "C:\Users"
But this is why you don't use a string literal, you call one of the kernel functions designed to return the location, or expand the USERPROFILE environment variable. Rather like just using the '~' path on Linux.
Aside from the lack of a third pair of legs, the combinations of a pair of panniers at the front that look like a pair of compound eyes, the black colour scheme, the shape of its legs, and the incessant buzzing the thing emits, all came together and made me think of Brundlefly.
Creepy. But obviously highly sophisticated (or they found a simple rule and implemented it well).
A paper ballot system has the advantage of being comprehensible to even those of average intelligence, visible, and simple. And thus it's much harder to subvert if you have transparency about your procedures and access to all participants. It scales easily with the task (the same small fraction of the population should serve any size of election), and compared to the importance of the data being counted, the additional wait for a manual count is of limited importance.
Electronic financial systems work well because both parties have an interest in the transaction being kocher. Electoral systems have no such balance ; if the system in your area has been bought, the interest is all with the buyer. With a paper system, for each person involved in the process, you have another chance that subversion will be both detected and reported. With a computer system, the pool of people able to even detect fraud is minimal, and well known (and thus much easier to target for bribes, threats, whatever).
I love computers. I get to tinker with them for a living. But they have no place in a transparent democratic electoral process.