People who are afraid are generally the bigger problem, not just with guns, but with anything. Fear is unreasoning.
In the case of guns, people who were brought up in areas where they were normal (I am not talking inner cities...), are generally taught firearm safety and respect for weapons. They are tools, like chainsaws, sticks of dynamite, kitchen knives, and scalpels. They all have their uses and their dangers. People who hate guns and are afraid of them do not see them as tools (for any use) and do not see any other side than fear.
I respect people who do not like guns and want nothing to do personally with guns, just as I respect vegetarians (especially as I was one for a while). I respect people who are concerned about guns, crime, and gun safety. I do not respect people who hate guns, who hate omnivores, who are rampant homophobes, etc. There are a lot of those around. Oddly, a lot of the people who hate guns, seem to want to enforce a ban of them *with guns*. I don't think they understand the disconnect. Why is Policeman Bob a priori and *always* more trustworthy than Farmer Joe? Why think Policeman Bob is always going to be closer to hand when someone else with a gun shows up? They weren't there at VA Tech. Guns exist. Hating them doesn't change that. Learning a bit about them at least provides an understanding of the problem and might be a small piece of the solution.
Note, that on the other side, it is not "gun-lovers" that is a problem, it is people with other kinds of unreasoning fears, such as (rabid) fear of government oppression, rabid racial hatred, rabid isolationism, and extreme fundamentalism. Poking the beehive with a stick (actually oppressing them) just makes things worse. There are actually reasonable people in the middle.
...
I can't remember one time when they talked to people who knew one of these mass murderers after the fact and they've said anything remotely like "well, he did talk about guns a lot" and "he went to the shooting range every week"....
The shooter at my college did talk about guns. His dad was a collector. He had a valid firearms permit and got occasional copies of American Rifleman or some such. When I roomed with the guy, we talked about guns on occasion. I had grown up, not with guns, but near enough to respect them and be a decent shot. My father-in-law is also a gun collector (has some beautiful historical pieces--- I collect bows myself) and my wife grew up with guns. None of the rest of us are mass murderers.
And no, even having been through a shooting, I am not a paranoid, pro-nanny state, anti-gun lobbyist. Some sane limits, if handled well. The shooting did leave me rather messed up for a bit and it took a while for me to get back to picking up a firearm (or even being around them), but eventually I had to straighten myself out; there aren't boogey men in every closet and I already knew what Hell looked like.
The problem with profiling is that most of the time it just plain *does not* work, especially with psychopaths who are often experts at manipulation. The problem with over-reaching gun-control is that there are not and cannot be enough police in enough places at the right times. They certainly weren't a help on campus that night. Besides, is a cop going to come out and shoot a coy dog for me when it goes after my chickens? Bad stuff happens, even to good people, even when we try to control all the variables, perhaps especially when we do. We all die someday and just have to deal with it.
I wonder what people will do when a *cop* goes on a rampage. That will just break their little minds...
On the ISP side, it is not their job to have forensic quality logs that can stand up as evidence in court. ISPs keep logs for their own internal purposes. So, to some extent, the data which ISPs are being required to provide via subpoena is being misused. I do not see any reason that the ISPs should have to keep data of sufficient quality to satisfy third party needs, particularly without being compensated for it. Having had to implement tamper and fraud and time change and dropped record and system failure and etc. resistant logging for a client, I can tell you it adds an order of magnitude of expense. This expense is of no benefit to the ISP.
When I was in the position of handling abuse reports in the past, I would not respond with user details unless absolutely forced to. Instead, the policy was that if someone reported a possible abuse of the TOS and provided their own logs sufficient to investigate, I would then perform an internal investigation, which might include beginning additional logging on the account if it seemed warranted. If a TOS violation was supportable, I would then notify the user and let them respond. In this case, the user would have said "WTF: I wasn't your customer at the time!" and I would have said: "OS! Computer error, my bad!" (if I had screwed up that badly in the first place). If they could not deny the TOS violation, I would terminate the account. If the TOS violation also involved possible illegal acts, I would then turn over my logs and notes to the appropriate authorities directly, with any necessary caveats; the authorities could do whatever they needed to do with the information. I would *not* turn over confidential information to the original reporter, whose identity and authority I could probably not validate anyway. They can get the information from the authorities if they are authorized to do so. Bottom line is, though, provide the data as is, say how it is gathered, and take no responsibility beyond that.
Basically someone reporting a violation would have two choices: go through the hoops and get action quickly, or get a supoena/court order and get action slowly. People went through the hoops. Luckily I did not have to deal with this long or often.
I have to agree completely. I have been incensed by the idiotic reactions of various schools lately, but this is not one of them. While the particular *site restriction policies* should probably be examined on a regular basis, enforcing rules of appropriate computer use is not, a priori, draconian, even if no mechanism is in place to prevent misuse. That would be like saying beating someone up in the hall is OK as long as no teacher is around.
The schools should make reasonable efforts to tighten down the computers to prevent getting around the policies, but even corps with competent IT staffs (the few there are) are having arm-loads of trouble with proxies. How do you keep up? Account restrictions and locked BIOS should be standard, but there is only so much to be done (technically) about keeping kids away from restricted content. A long suspension might be harsh depending on what was done, how many times, whether it involved legal as well as school policy violations, and what they do with the kid in the meantime. At my private high school growing up, we got a few public school rejects, who the school had trouble disciplining because the parents had a lot of financial clout with the small school's Board.
As an aside, why would you want something like this to be configurable?
As I said, many runtimes automatically enter the debugger when a trap of some kind is encountered; I think even gcc does. If the feature is designed to let you see what is going on when the code fails, it should fail whether the code is being debugged or not. If it is designed to let you see what is going on at particular points in the program that are not failures, that is what logging is for. If you want to see what is happening at each such point and step through them, put a break point on the log routine (break Logger.logEntry()). If you want to examine a specific instance, then you know where to put the break point, why change the code?
I have always been fairly heavy handed with assertions and state checking and never once even considered conditionally disabling them. If written with some care, runtime checks have negligible overhead and make considerable difference when diagnosing problems. Of course, I am somewhat biased because a lot of my early experience involved scientific or military applications where either results had to be reproducible or lives depended on them or both. You want a program to fail as early as possible if there is any suspicion it will come up with the wrong answer. This is not to say that you do not attempt to recover where appropriate, just that recovery is by design, not by accident, and that when you do recover, you generally log it somewhere.
Anyway, from looking at the patent, I a) don't see how this is much different from having
if (reality.isntworking()) failhere();
in your code and having the debugger kick in at that point (if it is active, or kick you back to the interpreter in some languages), or b) why you would want the code to not fail if the debugger is not active. I know some people have felt strongly about the ability to disable runtime assertions, I have just never understood the point of view.
but again, it seems at best a minor convenience and it could actually get in the way if that was not what I was intending to look at (like investigating a problem several steps after a successful recovery). It also opens up issues with different programmers on a team assigning breakpoints inconsistently and making it harder for others to debug. Am I missing something?
Yeah, except that debugging, breakpoints, and "virtual functions" or closures, interpreted code, or whatnot have been around for so long, that there is essentially nothing new under the sun. Smalltalk implementations were able to call into the debugger through an assert-like mechanism. You could then enter the debugger, change values around, and continue execution. Made things much easier when you were in the middle of a multi-day simulation test run and hit a problem. You could note the problem, fix it, and continue. Various Lisp, Scheme, ProLog and so forth variants have done some very neat things with debugging support through assertions, exceptions, traps, and all kinds of mechanisms. Essentially, any time you have an interpretive runtime, people play with different ways to do debugging.
Another way to look at it is that many runtimes will automatically enter the debugger on an exception or trap of some kind. An assertion failure generates an exception or trap. Assertions are generally controlled by DEBUG variables of some kind. Viola! Configurable code-side breakpoints. Different languages handle resumption from exceptions in different ways.
The problem is that people who write patents think that the mere act of putting two things together is innovative, even if the first thing is a tool, and the second is a logical extension of the tool's purpose, like adding "on the Internet" to something and calling it an invention. In this case, they did not even bother to see if it was done before, probably because they have no knowledge of languages outside the mainstream.
When the University owns the wires or pays for the connection, they do as they see fit as long as their policies foster academic research. But I think nobody can come and state that p2p have a real academic use without being called hypocrits. I hope the IT Service Desk (or the deans) will be open to creative use of p2p.... (snipped)
Actually, yes, I can see legitimate academic uses for P2P. When I was working on my thesis (pre-p2p) many of the things I was working with then (via a complex system of mirrors) are now distributed using p2p, including software distributions and large datasets. I have also recently downloaded a good bit of security software (e.g AutoPatcher) via P2P. A lot of the complex mirror systems and sites have been able to be reduced by P2P technology. For a lot of research projects, Open Source saves quite a bit of money, and Linux sure beats trying to get funding for Sun workstations.
That being said, I would have been able to get permission from the Major Head or whoever, if needed.
In fact, we did have to have some discussions over bandwidth usage, some of which was solved by mirroring software needed by several students locally to reduce usage (what P2p does automatically), and part of the problem of legitimate P2P usage can be solved going back to the manual approach.
As an aside, academic access needs are sometimes very different from corporate norms. At one point, for a Women's Studies paper, I needed to view Internet content of a "less than savory nature", which would likely have been banned by default in any corporate network. I won't elaborate on the content except to say that it was not graphical and that I felt like disassembling and scrubbing my computer afterward.
I like the idea that some folks have put forward of simply putting account caps on the students across the board. This eliminates problems with tunneling and cans other download protocols as well. People who use P2P legitimately on an irregular basis won't be affected.
The problem in Baghdad is that a 3rd of the cops are in the militia, so there is absolutely no one to trust. According to interviews I've read though, they have armed neighborhood watches where they switch off patrols precisely because the government is either ineffective or actively colluding with insurgents. It's a touch different over there.
Similarly, the problem in the "Wild West" is that there was little law enforcement and much of what there was was corrupt. An armed citizenry must be combined with competent and non-partisan law-enforcement. Citizens defend themselves and police enforce laws (investigate and punish). As many posters point out, in many violent situations, police don't arrive until long after it's over. There are not (and cannot be) enough police to protect everyone, as the recent situation amply demonstrates. Having been through a school shooting myself, I am also very much for the right to self-defense.
Well, I'm here at tech, and am still waiting for word on whether or not I've lost any friends today. One roommate of mine may have already lost one, and some friends have lost friends of theirs.
I am sorry. It is over ten years for me now, but waiting for news through that first night and sifting the rumors was hell. Any community gets a lot smaller when something like that happens. A big thing to keep in mind is to try to keep a level head in the weeks ahead. Campus officials usually do not function very well in these situations (at least not immediately), and throw in an invasion of press and so forth, and things can get chaotic. I remember friends of mine bodily escorting a reporter off campus who had slipped through the cordon and was trying to interview the girlfriend of one of the casualties. Some of them are worse than criminals. Do not worry about being rude or offending them; they have no right to your pain.
In all likelihood, they will bring in a troop of dedicated councilors with experience in this sort of thing. Being able to talk through it helps. Anyway, hang in there. I wish you the best and will be thinking of all of you.
Agreed. Basically, if someone has you penned in a room and is systematically shooting, you will get killed. Escape is not an option. You have nothing to lose in an attack, and something to gain no matter how unlikely. At that point, anything becomes a weapon and many things can be thrown prior to rushing: chairs, desks, backpacks (students?), etc. You can attempt to ambush around a doorway, or door if there is an opportunity, overturn tables, anything to give yourself even the slightest edge. I walk with (require) a cane and have had some sword training, which gives me a bit of an advantage (and most people ignore "gimps" as threats). I have had police try to 'disarm' me by removing my cane, but they don't like the idea of ADA lawsuits. I also usually carry a knife as a utility, the exact sort depending on local rules. A thrown case knife won't kill (with my aim) but it will certainly distract.
Part of it is that most people do not have the ability to think in emergencies. We have not been taught to think by society. After being through several emergencies (whether from violence or otherwise), you start to think differently. After getting through a couple situations where someone really wants to hurt you, you begin to to take note of things in the back of your mind: alternative exits, cover, possible weapons. It isn't paranoia and does not take over, it is just a background process, like when I am out in the wilderness and I am monitoring weather changes, keeping track of vegetation (in case I need particular plants in an emergency), possible shelters, and so forth. It is just basic situational awareness. If you work with it and train it a bit, it makes it much more likely you and maybe some other people will make it through when things hit the fan.
My wife and I do occasional local talks about basic disaster preparedness (e.g. getting drinking water when utilities have been knocked out). It is amazing how little people think about things before they happen. After the ice storm that devastated the area this winter, people pay a bit more attention. $#@* does happen, usually with no warning, and it doesn't hurt to put a little toward it.
It's also an inescapable product of training. Like I said, dehumanizing isn't limited to a few people or a few wars - it has included ALL combatants in ALL wars in as much of history as we have enough of to comment on. If you want a totally humanized nation, you simply cannot have an armed forces. Likewise, if you have an armed forces, you simply cannot have a totally humanized nation. I don't run the country, so which is "better" is not my problem. What I can be sure of is you can't have it both ways.
Not true and not inescapable, although I will certainly allow "overwhelmingly common". I do not believe that dehumanizing the enemy is necessary for mobilizing people to fight. In several cultures (Native Americans (*), Greeks, Samurai, some portions of Chivalry and the Crusades(**)), warfare was seen as an honorable pursuit when necessary and there were (sometimes elaborate) codes of honor for treatment of the enemy and of prisoners. In many, defeating an enemy was considered more important (sometimes much more) than killing or harming them, even when the dispute was serious. This was one of the major cultural clashes between Native Americans and Europeans, for instance.
In many ways, these practices provided a more 'humanized' method of resolving inevitable disputes which would otherwise escalate beyond control. When you dehumanize an enemy, what happens is you lose the ability to turn off the conflict anywhere short of destruction of one side or the other. Barbarism begets barbarism and fuels feuds, which is how we land where we are in the Middle East.
(*)Generalizing: there were certainly tribes where this was not the case. Among many, though, "counting coup" or touching an enemy, gained one much honor. Touching an enemy when you could have killed them would sometimes shame them into surrender, especially if done by surprise.
(**)This took many different forms. The Knights Templar, for instance, were intolerant and slaughtered men, women, and children without discretion, just to escalate the conflict. Secular orders, however, depended on nationality, liege, and time period, as to how they behaved. There are many instances of christian and muslim warriors honoring warrior codes, including parole and ransom, captured knights being honored guests to muslim nobles while awaiting ransom, and so forth. The codes of both sides required honorable treatment of the enemy, prisoners, and non-combatants, etc. Following them was sometimes a different matter.
I, too, prefer peace to war, but those who do not take action when needed, however distasteful, are condemning themselves or their children to slavery. From a song by Leslie Fish about a man who prays for peace and gets it. You deserve to hear it sung; it is a beautiful piece.
...
CHORUS:
The sun is also a warrior.
Knowledge can also destroy.
Nor can the kindest will,
Preserve you from the kill.
Not all of wisdom brings joy.
He raised his voice and he raised his hand.
All strife stopped at the god's command.
No voice ventured an angry word,
No hand struck and no weapon stirred.
In time, the man called the old god back.
"Look," he cried, "what my people lack!
One lord rules over all the earth,
And we're all his slaves from the hour of birth.
CHORUS
"Look, he owns all wealth, and he owns all land,
We starve and die under his command.
He speaks the truth and he gives us peace,
But all that I hope for is our release."
The old god said, "This is what you willed.
For only thus is your wish fulfilled.
War's five sources I took away,
Yet I will give four of them back today."
"If they know that they could fix the problems later on, they could beat the competition to market."" Great, just what we need - hardware suppliers being encouraged to release buggy versions in the guise of fully working products.
Hasnt the lessons that have been learnt by the software industry had *any* impact?
Sure, and those lessons are being fastidiously applied here. Customers buy that
buggy, undercooked software and wait for the patches. Problem is, in increasing numbers of
cases, the vendors are learning that they don't have to even ship patches (e.g. game industry, commodity hardware drivers and apps) or only for a very short lifetimes.
Fast-followers usually have much better products than first-to-market vendors, and it used to be that they had better success as well. I am not sure that is always the case these days. Look also at the release of Vista and the fact that a new XP system simply cannot be purchased, locking customers into being beta testers (or getting off the platform entirely).
In some sense, this has already extended to hardware as more and more depends on firmware and flashable updates. a good portion of drivers for some hardware consists of software to offload to firmware, one of the things that makes opensource drivers a pain.
This stuff doesn't shock me anymore, including the threat against his two year old daughter.
I had a friend in DC who was in the Secret Service. A good portion of her job was keeping track of suspicious, sick, or threatening mail sent to the First Family (Clintons at the time). The level of filth was astounding, everything from disgusting love letters to explicit and detailed threats aimed at Chelsea for instance. Many of these people apparently have been sending letters for decades, have been thoroughly investigated, and have been considered "harmless" if rather damaged.
The level of rancor and vitriol on sites like politico and homesteadingtoday can render discussions completely useless, and these are not anonymous posters generally. It seems to me that right-leaning, "Republican" posters are much quicker to suggest violence as a solution both to world/political problems and to disagreements with other posters. I highly doubt these are representative of core Republicans, but they are the voice which is making itself heard in many places and it is very damaging.
>But every time someone even suggests that a choice exists,
>people scream.
Hey, I'm not arguing against conservation. I'm just saying
packing people into apartments isn't how to do it.
As it happens, I live in a city neighborhood and work about
15 minutes from my house. But I'm not going to judge those
who don't.
My apologies. I'm a little touchy because I have had several of these conversations lately on and off line...
Anyway, you're probably missing the point of my Al Gore and
John Edwards references. The only way to achieve conservation
by force is with political power. And those with political
power *are* going to live not according to the eco-utopia
of apartments. It's not just a handy slam against current
politicians; it's an observation of the built in difficulty
of achieving conservation by fiat (again, see the Soviets for
how eco-friendly they were).
...and you are largely right. I am working on a journal entry at the moment discussing this very topic. I don't think we can solve the problem without social change from the bottom, and, at least in the US, I simply don't see that change coming. Those in power can always claim that the waste is "justified by the exigencies of their position" or such crap, like the special lanes for gov't officials in the USSR, but the common folk don't get that special treatment. A system of favors grows from that and breeds corruption.
A touch extreme isn't it? They commute a hell of a lot less in Europe, but they are hardly 'sardines'. But you make my point. You make an explicit choice, as do most other suburbanites. When I worked in IT, I lived in the city, in a nice apartment in a good section of town with good public transport. I didn't even own a car. I sometimes biked to work, but for exercise and scenery more than anything else (Arlington's bike trails are quite nice, Raleigh wasn't bad.). Now that I work with animals, I live in the country. For good portions of my life, my commute was ten minutes or less. I have never lived in a suburb, have never had a long commute, have never been a 'sardine' and have never been mugged. Urban planning keeps parks and other features available to apartment dwellers. Camping trips relieve the press of the city a hell of a lot better than mowing a pathetic strip of lawn. Not that hard. Would be a lot easier if more people contributed (to public transport for instance, not economical to suburbia).
Just don't complain about:
* long commutes, traffic, and accidents * decaying urban centers and crime * ozone and smog * road construction * dependence on foreign fuels * inability to produce enough biofuels (or anything else to relieve the crisis) * suburban sprawl, watershed deterioration * urbanization of suburban areas, forcing people to keep moving out * What neighbors?
Same with the 'buy local' problem. People can't be bothered to even find out what grows in their area and when, let alone buy it in season, so we ship things all over hell and gone at tremendous cost and treat the food in horrid ways so it still *looks* fresh when we get it. Then we complain that nothing tastes good. We spend enormous energy looking for 'bargains' and then complain about the quality. We complain about Walmartization and shop on convenience. As a people, we are hypocrites. They want someone else to come up with a solution as long as it doesn't affect them. "Sure, give me biofuel, just don't raise prices or ask me to change my habits."
As long as people keep making those choices, we will continue on this road. But every time someone even suggests that a choice exists, people scream. God forbid we should take responsibility for our actions or think about consequences beyond our own nose. People can be better than this; we should be.
The argument for conservation is not that we turn the clock back--- people in the past weren't terribly friendly to the environment either--- that's a strawman. The argument is that we make an honest attempt to balance our books. We are profligate spenders and mindless consumers. We argue about biofuels and watch *NASCAR* for cripes sake. We ship oranges from Florida for processing in California and back for sale in Florida (yes, really). We ship Wisconsin cheese to New York and New York cheese to Wisconsin. We ship potatoes *to* Idaho! We commute hours a day to/from work to live in huge cookie cutter developments that waste heat/cooling/electricity while letting the urban centers decay. We grow corn on marginal land to feed animals in feedlots that are designed by evolution to graze for themselves--- then we use antibiotics to treat all the diseases they pick up in the feedlots and chemicals to treat the fact that they can't digest corn. We waste non-renewable petroleum on disposable plastic packaging and risk running out of it for pharmaceuticals. We don't need to haul water 1/2 mile from the well (though I've done it), we just need to stop being *idiots*.
If we actually stopped and thought about what we were doing a small fraction of the time and budgeted what we had, we might have a chance of getting to that future you talk about. Otherwise, all that will happen is that new technology will beget *more waste*. How far has the space program gotten in the last half century? People flush the economy and ecology down the toilet and complain about research being a waste of money, so landfills fill up and space exploration languishes.
It's interesting how you equate living within our means with "poverty". How far financially in debt are you? If you aren't, why not just take out more loans? Obviously you could live richer with more debt.
I don't equate riches with waste. There are a lot of things worth having which don't require staring at gas guzzling vehicles zooming around in circles, for instance, like, say, the enormous supply of literature we've built up, or, God forbid, sitting around with a group of folks making things with your own hands and telling stories.
A person who cannot balance their checkbook and stop spending when it runs out (allowing for situations totally beyond their control) is an idiot, nothing more, nothing less. As a people, our checks started bouncing a while back. Fiscal deficits, ecological impact, we just keep borrowing. Technology won't help for one very simple reason: if you give people 20% cleaner energy, they will use 25% more. If we mastered vacuum energy right now and could provide everyone with a perfectly clean, unlimited source of power, all that would happen is the earth would get an awful lot hotter from the waste heat. One crisis would be replaced with another with nothing gained. We've become glutted on spending for its own sake, consuming to no purpose. *That* is what is wrong and science won't fix it.
Somewhere along the line, particularly if we are to learn how to live in space, in closed environments, we need to learn how to balance our accounts. If we cannot learn something that simple, even the (supposedly) most intelligent among us, what is the point? It's not 'poverty', it's common sense.
Thanks. Though your answer and the AC's answer above contradict each other I get the feeling that yours is correct.
From the first rule, I assume that OSX also uses natd and has it on but doing nothing by default too?
It seems weird to me to have both the ipfw and natd on by default...and doing nothing. In FreeBSD, I can load them up and shut them down on the fly after boot-up. Can you not do this in OSX?
Forgive my stupid questions. I really need to get a hold of one of the G5s we have here and work and play with it.
natd is running on this system, but I also have Internet Sharing enabled. I don't know if turning it off actually disables natd or just adjusts the settings (have to try it some time). I do know that if I enable the firewall, Internet Sharing stops functioning, so the firewall rules are not modified by the presence of Internet Sharing. I am working on a custom ipfw config to correct this. To me, this is a
big Apple screwup, since their is no mention anywhere in the settings that the firewall does not or should not work when sharing is enabled--- they should adjust the rules automatically or at least warn the user and disable the firewall.
I have not been able to figure out any way of shutting ipfw down. All the examples of 'stopping' it from the command line involve "ipfw -f -q flush", which doesn't do anything of the sort.
I don't have a problem with it running all of the time. It's not like it saps performance. I would like it have some teeth in the default configuration, if not as a default deny, at least rejecting obvious malformed packets and spoofs. I would love to have some i/f specific control on the "Advanced" tab so I don't have to muck with launchd. If not, you should be able to just create a file in an appropriate place for it to read in. The process involves creating a couple of control scripts which should be there already (not a big deal, just annoying). Better yet, you should be able to add rules right from the 'Advanced' tab like any cheap hardware firewall.
If you do get to play with one of the G5s, turn on the firewall, twiddle settings in the GUI, and look at the generated rules. They are fairly poorly done. For a 'default deny' state, a lot is let through, especially if you enable UDP blocking. Hopefully some of this will improve with the new release, but in the meantime, anyone serious about security needs to write their own rules. ipfw is great technology, but Apple flubs it by not harnessing its power.
Agreed. The premise of the article all around was rather foolish. They deliberately and rather randomly made adjustments to lower security but none to raise them, including turning on some legacy services on some platforms that have not been used since people threw sharpened sticks at each other and their only test was the vulnerability database of one product. Obviously Vista wouldn't show up because it is rather new and no exploits have had time to develop, and obviously the UNIX variants would come up with mostly the same results because they share source code.
Disabling the firewall on Vista was rather foolish and not enabling it on OS X, while making other changes equally so. That being said, Apple is still nuts for not enabling the firewall by default (technically it is enabled and running, but its configuration is empty).
My brother has been the A&S minister for a kingdom going on 10 years or so now (I don't feel like calling him out, sorry), and he can tell you that Laurels are not always deserved in every instance... it's often a rather political process.
Very much agreed, although that is a problem for almost any credentialing process. There is also the problem, in academia and elsewhere, that credentials might be meaningless now even if once earned. I have met people in all walks of life who may have once been brilliant but now sit on their laurels (so to speak). Caveat lector.
I recently met a doctor who claimed to be a specialist in a particular disease, that, on simple questioning, had obviously not read any research in the last ten years, including basic AMA publications on the subject. I would not dare treat patients at my level of knowledge and yet he does with less. He had expertise, it was just woefully dated and he had an "I am God almighty" ego to boot.
One of my measures of credibility in an expert is three magic words: "I don't know", even better if followed by "but I'll find out." If someone can let go of their ego long enough to admit that they do not know everything, then I can believe that they are still challenging their knowledge and keeping up to date or might listen to reasoned argument. Many experts cannot carry an entire field around in their head, but they probably have access to references, resources, and contacts. Hopefully they have been trained to think somewhere along the way as well.
In my own case, I have an Environmental Science degree, but it is quite old. I try to keep up with developments but am no longer in the field, so my expertise may not be the measure in some ways of someone active in school who has not yet earned their degree, or someone with a CS degree who has worked in air quality monitoring for the last two decades. On the other hand, I have good research skills and can find what I need readily enough. It's all relative, but giving the reader some more information to judge doesn't hurt. A big thing is looking at a cross section of other things the 'expert' wrote and doing a search to find out what their reputation is generally. Can be hard with a pseudonym.
A big problem with Wikipedia, though, is it's too volatile, so it is hard to tell the POV of the article as a whole without doing a lot of digging through revisions. Being able to look at a handful of discrete/forked articles with commentary would make it easier. As it is, I never take a Wikipedia article at face value, but it and the accompanying discussion page is a useful launching point for my own investigation.
It seems like a lot of this could be improved a couple of ways:
First, have a way, as suggested of verifying claimed credentials if the poster wants to have them verified, but allow a wide variety of credentials. As an example, I am a member of the Society for Creative Anachronisms (SCA) which has an order called the Order of Laurels which is awarded for research and crafting in (usually specific) medieval arts and sciences. These people (often) do not have accredited degrees, but may be an expert on, for instance, period bobbin lace, or 14th century fabrics, or brewing of mead. In those specific areas, their expertise is probably vastly more than a Doctor of Medieval History. As an example, I know a Laurel who has spent years studying medieval and renaissance manuscripts on paper production right down to actually building working paper mills using period materials. I have then taken his paper and used them for pen and ink drawings with homemade (india) ink and a quill. Such attempts offer a whole different perspective on the practicalities of medieval life versus mere academic work.
There are a good number of organizations and societies out there that are similar in that respect. Let the reader judge the value of the credentials. Just verify their validity. If someone wants to claim things in their biography which aren't verified, tell the reader that. Let them judge. If someone wants to pots anonymously, same thing.
Second, allow the creation of *multiple* articles on specific topics with differing points of view. Allow certain people to take charge of those specific articles but allow them to fork (perhaps with some limits). Only then will you really start to get a *coherent* democratic perspective. As an example, an academic expert on period inks might have a certain opinion on how those inks were made and used, but someone at the national archives who has actually reproduced those techniques and found that some of them are impractical would have a different perspective. Let the reader judge. This makes it much clearer to the reader that they are getting *opinions* and makes citations more stable.
I think it also depends on whether the settlement agreement the defense lawyer was asking for was signed. The agreement would provide for the defendant's legal fees and ensure that the matter is permanently over. In the letter, it also mentioned that neither side could participate in actions by third parties against each other, such that, for instance, the defendant could not take part in a class action suit against the RIAA under the proposed settlement. Given that the defense lawyer suggested he would be amenable to confidentiality on the actual terms of the settlement, we may never know the details.
If, on the other hand, the RIAA dismissed without settling, I would imagine the defendant will counter-sue for legal fees, etc.
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People who are afraid are generally the bigger problem, not just with guns, but with anything. Fear is unreasoning.
In the case of guns, people who were brought up in areas where they were normal (I am not talking inner cities...), are generally taught firearm safety and respect for weapons. They are tools, like chainsaws, sticks of dynamite, kitchen knives, and scalpels. They all have their uses and their dangers. People who hate guns and are afraid of them do not see them as tools (for any use) and do not see any other side than fear.
I respect people who do not like guns and want nothing to do personally with guns, just as I respect vegetarians (especially as I was one for a while). I respect people who are concerned about guns, crime, and gun safety. I do not respect people who hate guns, who hate omnivores, who are rampant homophobes, etc. There are a lot of those around. Oddly, a lot of the people who hate guns, seem to want to enforce a ban of them *with guns*. I don't think they understand the disconnect. Why is Policeman Bob a priori and *always* more trustworthy than Farmer Joe? Why think Policeman Bob is always going to be closer to hand when someone else with a gun shows up? They weren't there at VA Tech. Guns exist. Hating them doesn't change that. Learning a bit about them at least provides an understanding of the problem and might be a small piece of the solution.
Note, that on the other side, it is not "gun-lovers" that is a problem, it is people with other kinds of unreasoning fears, such as (rabid) fear of government oppression, rabid racial hatred, rabid isolationism, and extreme fundamentalism. Poking the beehive with a stick (actually oppressing them) just makes things worse. There are actually reasonable people in the middle.
The shooter at my college did talk about guns. His dad was a collector. He had a valid firearms permit and got occasional copies of American Rifleman or some such. When I roomed with the guy, we talked about guns on occasion. I had grown up, not with guns, but near enough to respect them and be a decent shot. My father-in-law is also a gun collector (has some beautiful historical pieces--- I collect bows myself) and my wife grew up with guns. None of the rest of us are mass murderers. And no, even having been through a shooting, I am not a paranoid, pro-nanny state, anti-gun lobbyist. Some sane limits, if handled well. The shooting did leave me rather messed up for a bit and it took a while for me to get back to picking up a firearm (or even being around them), but eventually I had to straighten myself out; there aren't boogey men in every closet and I already knew what Hell looked like.
The problem with profiling is that most of the time it just plain *does not* work, especially with psychopaths who are often experts at manipulation. The problem with over-reaching gun-control is that there are not and cannot be enough police in enough places at the right times. They certainly weren't a help on campus that night. Besides, is a cop going to come out and shoot a coy dog for me when it goes after my chickens? Bad stuff happens, even to good people, even when we try to control all the variables, perhaps especially when we do. We all die someday and just have to deal with it.
I wonder what people will do when a *cop* goes on a rampage. That will just break their little minds...
On the ISP side, it is not their job to have forensic quality logs that can stand up as evidence in court. ISPs keep logs for their own internal purposes. So, to some extent, the data which ISPs are being required to provide via subpoena is being misused. I do not see any reason that the ISPs should have to keep data of sufficient quality to satisfy third party needs, particularly without being compensated for it. Having had to implement tamper and fraud and time change and dropped record and system failure and etc. resistant logging for a client, I can tell you it adds an order of magnitude of expense. This expense is of no benefit to the ISP.
When I was in the position of handling abuse reports in the past, I would not respond with user details unless absolutely forced to. Instead, the policy was that if someone reported a possible abuse of the TOS and provided their own logs sufficient to investigate, I would then perform an internal investigation, which might include beginning additional logging on the account if it seemed warranted. If a TOS violation was supportable, I would then notify the user and let them respond. In this case, the user would have said "WTF: I wasn't your customer at the time!" and I would have said: "OS! Computer error, my bad!" (if I had screwed up that badly in the first place). If they could not deny the TOS violation, I would terminate the account. If the TOS violation also involved possible illegal acts, I would then turn over my logs and notes to the appropriate authorities directly, with any necessary caveats; the authorities could do whatever they needed to do with the information. I would *not* turn over confidential information to the original reporter, whose identity and authority I could probably not validate anyway. They can get the information from the authorities if they are authorized to do so. Bottom line is, though, provide the data as is, say how it is gathered, and take no responsibility beyond that.
Basically someone reporting a violation would have two choices: go through the hoops and get action quickly, or get a supoena/court order and get action slowly. People went through the hoops. Luckily I did not have to deal with this long or often.
I have to agree completely. I have been incensed by the idiotic reactions of various schools lately, but this is not one of them. While the particular *site restriction policies* should probably be examined on a regular basis, enforcing rules of appropriate computer use is not, a priori, draconian, even if no mechanism is in place to prevent misuse. That would be like saying beating someone up in the hall is OK as long as no teacher is around.
The schools should make reasonable efforts to tighten down the computers to prevent getting around the policies, but even corps with competent IT staffs (the few there are) are having arm-loads of trouble with proxies. How do you keep up? Account restrictions and locked BIOS should be standard, but there is only so much to be done (technically) about keeping kids away from restricted content. A long suspension might be harsh depending on what was done, how many times, whether it involved legal as well as school policy violations, and what they do with the kid in the meantime. At my private high school growing up, we got a few public school rejects, who the school had trouble disciplining because the parents had a lot of financial clout with the small school's Board.
As an aside, why would you want something like this to be configurable?
As I said, many runtimes automatically enter the debugger when a trap of some kind is encountered; I think even gcc does. If the feature is designed to let you see what is going on when the code fails, it should fail whether the code is being debugged or not. If it is designed to let you see what is going on at particular points in the program that are not failures, that is what logging is for. If you want to see what is happening at each such point and step through them, put a break point on the log routine (break Logger.logEntry()). If you want to examine a specific instance, then you know where to put the break point, why change the code?
I have always been fairly heavy handed with assertions and state checking and never once even considered conditionally disabling them. If written with some care, runtime checks have negligible overhead and make considerable difference when diagnosing problems. Of course, I am somewhat biased because a lot of my early experience involved scientific or military applications where either results had to be reproducible or lives depended on them or both. You want a program to fail as early as possible if there is any suspicion it will come up with the wrong answer. This is not to say that you do not attempt to recover where appropriate, just that recovery is by design, not by accident, and that when you do recover, you generally log it somewhere.
Anyway, from looking at the patent, I a) don't see how this is much different from having
in your code and having the debugger kick in at that point (if it is active, or kick you back to the interpreter in some languages), or b) why you would want the code to not fail if the debugger is not active. I know some people have felt strongly about the ability to disable runtime assertions, I have just never understood the point of view.
I suppose it might be nice to be able to have:
but again, it seems at best a minor convenience and it could actually get in the way if that was not what I was intending to look at (like investigating a problem several steps after a successful recovery). It also opens up issues with different programmers on a team assigning breakpoints inconsistently and making it harder for others to debug. Am I missing something?
Yeah, except that debugging, breakpoints, and "virtual functions" or closures, interpreted code, or whatnot have been around for so long, that there is essentially nothing new under the sun. Smalltalk implementations were able to call into the debugger through an assert-like mechanism. You could then enter the debugger, change values around, and continue execution. Made things much easier when you were in the middle of a multi-day simulation test run and hit a problem. You could note the problem, fix it, and continue. Various Lisp, Scheme, ProLog and so forth variants have done some very neat things with debugging support through assertions, exceptions, traps, and all kinds of mechanisms. Essentially, any time you have an interpretive runtime, people play with different ways to do debugging.
Another way to look at it is that many runtimes will automatically enter the debugger on an exception or trap of some kind. An assertion failure generates an exception or trap. Assertions are generally controlled by DEBUG variables of some kind. Viola! Configurable code-side breakpoints. Different languages handle resumption from exceptions in different ways.
The problem is that people who write patents think that the mere act of putting two things together is innovative, even if the first thing is a tool, and the second is a logical extension of the tool's purpose, like adding "on the Internet" to something and calling it an invention. In this case, they did not even bother to see if it was done before, probably because they have no knowledge of languages outside the mainstream.
Actually, yes, I can see legitimate academic uses for P2P. When I was working on my thesis (pre-p2p) many of the things I was working with then (via a complex system of mirrors) are now distributed using p2p, including software distributions and large datasets. I have also recently downloaded a good bit of security software (e.g AutoPatcher) via P2P. A lot of the complex mirror systems and sites have been able to be reduced by P2P technology. For a lot of research projects, Open Source saves quite a bit of money, and Linux sure beats trying to get funding for Sun workstations.
That being said, I would have been able to get permission from the Major Head or whoever, if needed. In fact, we did have to have some discussions over bandwidth usage, some of which was solved by mirroring software needed by several students locally to reduce usage (what P2p does automatically), and part of the problem of legitimate P2P usage can be solved going back to the manual approach.
As an aside, academic access needs are sometimes very different from corporate norms. At one point, for a Women's Studies paper, I needed to view Internet content of a "less than savory nature", which would likely have been banned by default in any corporate network. I won't elaborate on the content except to say that it was not graphical and that I felt like disassembling and scrubbing my computer afterward.
I like the idea that some folks have put forward of simply putting account caps on the students across the board. This eliminates problems with tunneling and cans other download protocols as well. People who use P2P legitimately on an irregular basis won't be affected.
The problem in Baghdad is that a 3rd of the cops are in the militia, so there is absolutely no one to trust. According to interviews I've read though, they have armed neighborhood watches where they switch off patrols precisely because the government is either ineffective or actively colluding with insurgents. It's a touch different over there.
Similarly, the problem in the "Wild West" is that there was little law enforcement and much of what there was was corrupt. An armed citizenry must be combined with competent and non-partisan law-enforcement. Citizens defend themselves and police enforce laws (investigate and punish). As many posters point out, in many violent situations, police don't arrive until long after it's over. There are not (and cannot be) enough police to protect everyone, as the recent situation amply demonstrates. Having been through a school shooting myself, I am also very much for the right to self-defense.
I am sorry. It is over ten years for me now, but waiting for news through that first night and sifting the rumors was hell. Any community gets a lot smaller when something like that happens. A big thing to keep in mind is to try to keep a level head in the weeks ahead. Campus officials usually do not function very well in these situations (at least not immediately), and throw in an invasion of press and so forth, and things can get chaotic. I remember friends of mine bodily escorting a reporter off campus who had slipped through the cordon and was trying to interview the girlfriend of one of the casualties. Some of them are worse than criminals. Do not worry about being rude or offending them; they have no right to your pain.
In all likelihood, they will bring in a troop of dedicated councilors with experience in this sort of thing. Being able to talk through it helps. Anyway, hang in there. I wish you the best and will be thinking of all of you.
Agreed. Basically, if someone has you penned in a room and is systematically shooting, you will get killed. Escape is not an option. You have nothing to lose in an attack, and something to gain no matter how unlikely. At that point, anything becomes a weapon and many things can be thrown prior to rushing: chairs, desks, backpacks (students?), etc. You can attempt to ambush around a doorway, or door if there is an opportunity, overturn tables, anything to give yourself even the slightest edge. I walk with (require) a cane and have had some sword training, which gives me a bit of an advantage (and most people ignore "gimps" as threats). I have had police try to 'disarm' me by removing my cane, but they don't like the idea of ADA lawsuits. I also usually carry a knife as a utility, the exact sort depending on local rules. A thrown case knife won't kill (with my aim) but it will certainly distract.
Part of it is that most people do not have the ability to think in emergencies. We have not been taught to think by society. After being through several emergencies (whether from violence or otherwise), you start to think differently. After getting through a couple situations where someone really wants to hurt you, you begin to to take note of things in the back of your mind: alternative exits, cover, possible weapons. It isn't paranoia and does not take over, it is just a background process, like when I am out in the wilderness and I am monitoring weather changes, keeping track of vegetation (in case I need particular plants in an emergency), possible shelters, and so forth. It is just basic situational awareness. If you work with it and train it a bit, it makes it much more likely you and maybe some other people will make it through when things hit the fan.
My wife and I do occasional local talks about basic disaster preparedness (e.g. getting drinking water when utilities have been knocked out). It is amazing how little people think about things before they happen. After the ice storm that devastated the area this winter, people pay a bit more attention. $#@* does happen, usually with no warning, and it doesn't hurt to put a little toward it.
It's also an inescapable product of training. Like I said, dehumanizing isn't limited to a few people or a few wars - it has included ALL combatants in ALL wars in as much of history as we have enough of to comment on. If you want a totally humanized nation, you simply cannot have an armed forces. Likewise, if you have an armed forces, you simply cannot have a totally humanized nation. I don't run the country, so which is "better" is not my problem. What I can be sure of is you can't have it both ways.
Not true and not inescapable, although I will certainly allow "overwhelmingly common". I do not believe that dehumanizing the enemy is necessary for mobilizing people to fight. In several cultures (Native Americans (*), Greeks, Samurai, some portions of Chivalry and the Crusades(**)), warfare was seen as an honorable pursuit when necessary and there were (sometimes elaborate) codes of honor for treatment of the enemy and of prisoners. In many, defeating an enemy was considered more important (sometimes much more) than killing or harming them, even when the dispute was serious. This was one of the major cultural clashes between Native Americans and Europeans, for instance.
In many ways, these practices provided a more 'humanized' method of resolving inevitable disputes which would otherwise escalate beyond control. When you dehumanize an enemy, what happens is you lose the ability to turn off the conflict anywhere short of destruction of one side or the other. Barbarism begets barbarism and fuels feuds, which is how we land where we are in the Middle East.
(*)Generalizing: there were certainly tribes where this was not the case. Among many, though, "counting coup" or touching an enemy, gained one much honor. Touching an enemy when you could have killed them would sometimes shame them into surrender, especially if done by surprise.
(**)This took many different forms. The Knights Templar, for instance, were intolerant and slaughtered men, women, and children without discretion, just to escalate the conflict. Secular orders, however, depended on nationality, liege, and time period, as to how they behaved. There are many instances of christian and muslim warriors honoring warrior codes, including parole and ransom, captured knights being honored guests to muslim nobles while awaiting ransom, and so forth. The codes of both sides required honorable treatment of the enemy, prisoners, and non-combatants, etc. Following them was sometimes a different matter.
I, too, prefer peace to war, but those who do not take action when needed, however distasteful, are condemning themselves or their children to slavery. From a song by Leslie Fish about a man who prays for peace and gets it. You deserve to hear it sung; it is a beautiful piece.
Full lyrics at: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/l/leslie+fish/the+sun+i s+also+a+warrior_20277971.html
Sure, and those lessons are being fastidiously applied here. Customers buy that buggy, undercooked software and wait for the patches. Problem is, in increasing numbers of cases, the vendors are learning that they don't have to even ship patches (e.g. game industry, commodity hardware drivers and apps) or only for a very short lifetimes.
Fast-followers usually have much better products than first-to-market vendors, and it used to be that they had better success as well. I am not sure that is always the case these days. Look also at the release of Vista and the fact that a new XP system simply cannot be purchased, locking customers into being beta testers (or getting off the platform entirely).
In some sense, this has already extended to hardware as more and more depends on firmware and flashable updates. a good portion of drivers for some hardware consists of software to offload to firmware, one of the things that makes opensource drivers a pain.
This stuff doesn't shock me anymore, including the threat against his two year old daughter.
I had a friend in DC who was in the Secret Service. A good portion of her job was keeping track of suspicious, sick, or threatening mail sent to the First Family (Clintons at the time). The level of filth was astounding, everything from disgusting love letters to explicit and detailed threats aimed at Chelsea for instance. Many of these people apparently have been sending letters for decades, have been thoroughly investigated, and have been considered "harmless" if rather damaged.
The level of rancor and vitriol on sites like politico and homesteadingtoday can render discussions completely useless, and these are not anonymous posters generally. It seems to me that right-leaning, "Republican" posters are much quicker to suggest violence as a solution both to world/political problems and to disagreements with other posters. I highly doubt these are representative of core Republicans, but they are the voice which is making itself heard in many places and it is very damaging.
I also find it ironic that his AC post about how AC posts get buried, is +5 insightful. Obviously the system is working as intended...
>people scream.
Hey, I'm not arguing against conservation. I'm just saying
packing people into apartments isn't how to do it.
As it happens, I live in a city neighborhood and work about
15 minutes from my house. But I'm not going to judge those
who don't.
My apologies. I'm a little touchy because I have had several of these conversations lately on and off line...
Anyway, you're probably missing the point of my Al Gore and
John Edwards references. The only way to achieve conservation
by force is with political power. And those with political
power *are* going to live not according to the eco-utopia
of apartments. It's not just a handy slam against current
politicians; it's an observation of the built in difficulty
of achieving conservation by fiat (again, see the Soviets for
how eco-friendly they were).
...and you are largely right. I am working on a journal entry at the moment discussing this very topic. I don't think we can solve the problem without social change from the bottom, and, at least in the US, I simply don't see that change coming. Those in power can always claim that the waste is "justified by the exigencies of their position" or such crap, like the special lanes for gov't officials in the USSR, but the common folk don't get that special treatment. A system of favors grows from that and breeds corruption.
A touch extreme isn't it? They commute a hell of a lot less in Europe, but they are hardly 'sardines'. But you make my point. You make an explicit choice, as do most other suburbanites. When I worked in IT, I lived in the city, in a nice apartment in a good section of town with good public transport. I didn't even own a car. I sometimes biked to work, but for exercise and scenery more than anything else (Arlington's bike trails are quite nice, Raleigh wasn't bad.). Now that I work with animals, I live in the country. For good portions of my life, my commute was ten minutes or less. I have never lived in a suburb, have never had a long commute, have never been a 'sardine' and have never been mugged. Urban planning keeps parks and other features available to apartment dwellers. Camping trips relieve the press of the city a hell of a lot better than mowing a pathetic strip of lawn. Not that hard. Would be a lot
easier if more people contributed (to public transport for instance, not economical to suburbia).
Just don't complain about:
* long commutes, traffic, and accidents
* decaying urban centers and crime
* ozone and smog
* road construction
* dependence on foreign fuels
* inability to produce enough biofuels (or anything else to relieve the crisis)
* suburban sprawl, watershed deterioration
* urbanization of suburban areas, forcing people to keep moving out
* What neighbors?
Same with the 'buy local' problem. People can't be bothered to even find out what grows in their area and when, let alone buy it in season, so we ship things all over hell and gone at tremendous cost and treat the food in horrid ways so it still *looks* fresh when we get it. Then we complain that nothing
tastes good. We spend enormous energy looking for 'bargains' and then complain about the quality. We complain about Walmartization and shop on convenience. As a people, we are hypocrites. They want
someone else to come up with a solution as long as it doesn't affect them. "Sure, give me biofuel, just don't raise prices or ask me to change my habits."
As long as people keep making those choices, we will continue on this road. But every time someone even suggests that a choice exists, people scream. God forbid we should take responsibility for our actions or think about consequences beyond our own nose. People can be better than this; we should be.
The argument for conservation is not that we turn the clock back--- people in the past weren't terribly friendly to the environment either--- that's a strawman. The argument is that we make an honest attempt to balance our books. We are profligate spenders and mindless consumers. We argue about biofuels and watch *NASCAR* for cripes sake. We ship oranges from Florida for processing in California and back for sale in Florida (yes, really). We ship Wisconsin cheese to New York and New York cheese to Wisconsin. We ship potatoes *to* Idaho! We commute hours a day to/from work to live in huge cookie cutter developments that waste heat/cooling/electricity while letting the urban centers decay. We grow corn on marginal land to feed animals in feedlots that are designed by evolution to graze for themselves--- then we use antibiotics to treat all the diseases they pick up in the feedlots and chemicals to treat the fact that they can't digest corn. We waste non-renewable petroleum on disposable plastic packaging and risk running out of it for pharmaceuticals. We don't need to haul water 1/2 mile from the well (though I've done it), we just need to stop being *idiots*.
If we actually stopped and thought about what we were doing a small fraction of the time and budgeted what we had, we might have a chance of getting to that future you talk about. Otherwise, all that will happen is that new technology will beget *more waste*. How far has the space program gotten in the last half century? People flush the economy and ecology down the toilet and complain about research being a waste of money, so landfills fill up and space exploration languishes.
It's interesting how you equate living within our means with "poverty". How far financially in debt are you? If you aren't, why not just take out more loans? Obviously you could live richer with more debt.
I don't equate riches with waste. There are a lot of things worth having which don't require staring at gas guzzling vehicles zooming around in circles, for instance, like, say, the enormous supply of literature we've built up, or, God forbid, sitting around with a group of folks making things with your own hands and telling stories.
A person who cannot balance their checkbook and stop spending when it runs out (allowing for situations totally beyond their control) is an idiot, nothing more, nothing less. As a people, our checks started bouncing a while back. Fiscal deficits, ecological impact, we just keep borrowing. Technology won't help for one very simple reason: if you give people 20% cleaner energy, they will use 25% more. If we mastered vacuum energy right now and could provide everyone with a perfectly clean, unlimited source of power, all that would happen is the earth would get an awful lot hotter from the waste heat. One crisis would be replaced with another with nothing gained. We've become glutted on spending for its own sake, consuming to no purpose. *That* is what is wrong and science won't fix it.
Somewhere along the line, particularly if we are to learn how to live in space, in closed environments, we need to learn how to balance our accounts. If we cannot learn something that simple, even the (supposedly) most intelligent among us, what is the point? It's not 'poverty', it's common sense.
natd is running on this system, but I also have Internet Sharing enabled. I don't know if turning it off actually disables natd or just adjusts the settings (have to try it some time). I do know that if I enable the firewall, Internet Sharing stops functioning, so the firewall rules are not modified by the presence of Internet Sharing. I am working on a custom ipfw config to correct this. To me, this is a big Apple screwup, since their is no mention anywhere in the settings that the firewall does not or should not work when sharing is enabled--- they should adjust the rules automatically or at least warn the user and disable the firewall.
I have not been able to figure out any way of shutting ipfw down. All the examples of 'stopping' it from the command line involve "ipfw -f -q flush", which doesn't do anything of the sort.
I don't have a problem with it running all of the time. It's not like it saps performance. I would like it have some teeth in the default configuration, if not as a default deny, at least rejecting obvious malformed packets and spoofs. I would love to have some i/f specific control on the "Advanced" tab so I don't have to muck with launchd. If not, you should be able to just create a file in an appropriate place for it to read in. The process involves creating a couple of control scripts which should be there already (not a big deal, just annoying). Better yet, you should be able to add rules right from the 'Advanced' tab like any cheap hardware firewall.
If you do get to play with one of the G5s, turn on the firewall, twiddle settings in the GUI, and look at the generated rules. They are fairly poorly done. For a 'default deny' state, a lot is let through, especially if you enable UDP blocking. Hopefully some of this will improve with the new release, but in the meantime, anyone serious about security needs to write their own rules. ipfw is great technology, but Apple flubs it by not harnessing its power.
Yep. This is what 10.4.x has it set to when the firewall is 'off':
Agreed. The premise of the article all around was rather foolish. They deliberately and rather randomly made adjustments to lower security but none to raise them, including turning on some legacy services on some platforms that have not been used since people threw sharpened sticks at each other and their only test was the vulnerability database of one product. Obviously Vista wouldn't show up because it is rather new and no exploits have had time to develop, and obviously the UNIX variants would come up with mostly the same results because they share source code.
Disabling the firewall on Vista was rather foolish and not enabling it on OS X, while making other changes equally so. That being said, Apple is still nuts for not enabling the firewall by default (technically it is enabled and running, but its configuration is empty).
Very much agreed, although that is a problem for almost any credentialing process. There is also the problem, in academia and elsewhere, that credentials might be meaningless now even if once earned. I have met people in all walks of life who may have once been brilliant but now sit on their laurels (so to speak). Caveat lector.
I recently met a doctor who claimed to be a specialist in a particular disease, that, on simple questioning, had obviously not read any research in the last ten years, including basic AMA publications on the subject. I would not dare treat patients at my level of knowledge and yet he does with less. He had expertise, it was just woefully dated and he had an "I am God almighty" ego to boot.
One of my measures of credibility in an expert is three magic words: "I don't know", even better if followed by "but I'll find out." If someone can let go of their ego long enough to admit that they do not know everything, then I can believe that they are still challenging their knowledge and keeping up to date or might listen to reasoned argument. Many experts cannot carry an entire field around in their head, but they probably have access to references, resources, and contacts. Hopefully they have been trained to think somewhere along the way as well.
In my own case, I have an Environmental Science degree, but it is quite old. I try to keep up with developments but am no longer in the field, so my expertise may not be the measure in some ways of someone active in school who has not yet earned their degree, or someone with a CS degree who has worked in air quality monitoring for the last two decades. On the other hand, I have good research skills and can find what I need readily enough. It's all relative, but giving the reader some more information to judge doesn't hurt. A big thing is looking at a cross section of other things the 'expert' wrote and doing a search to find out what their reputation is generally. Can be hard with a pseudonym.
A big problem with Wikipedia, though, is it's too volatile, so it is hard to tell the POV of the article as a whole without doing a lot of digging through revisions. Being able to look at a handful of discrete/forked articles with commentary would make it easier. As it is, I never take a Wikipedia article at face value, but it and the accompanying discussion page is a useful launching point for my own investigation.
It seems like a lot of this could be improved a couple of ways:
First, have a way, as suggested of verifying claimed credentials if the poster wants to have them verified, but allow a wide variety of credentials. As an example, I am a member of the Society for Creative Anachronisms (SCA) which has an order called the Order of Laurels which is awarded for research and crafting in (usually specific) medieval arts and sciences. These people (often) do not have accredited degrees, but may be an expert on, for instance, period bobbin lace, or 14th century fabrics, or brewing of mead. In those specific areas, their expertise is probably vastly more than a Doctor of Medieval History. As an example, I know a Laurel who has spent years studying medieval and renaissance manuscripts on paper production right down to actually building working paper mills using period materials. I have then taken his paper and used them for pen and ink drawings with homemade (india) ink and a quill. Such attempts offer a whole different perspective on the practicalities of medieval life versus mere academic work.
There are a good number of organizations and societies out there that are similar in that respect. Let the reader judge the value of the credentials. Just verify their validity. If someone wants to claim things in their biography which aren't verified, tell the reader that. Let them judge. If someone wants to pots anonymously, same thing.
Second, allow the creation of *multiple* articles on specific topics with differing points of view. Allow certain people to take charge of those specific articles but allow them to fork (perhaps with some limits). Only then will you really start to get a *coherent* democratic perspective. As an example, an academic expert on period inks might have a certain opinion on how those inks were made and used, but someone at the national archives who has actually reproduced those techniques and found that some of them are impractical would have a different perspective. Let the reader judge. This makes it much clearer to the reader that they are getting *opinions* and makes citations more stable.
I think it also depends on whether the settlement agreement the defense lawyer was asking for was signed. The agreement would provide for the defendant's legal fees and ensure that the matter is permanently over. In the letter, it also mentioned that neither side could participate in actions by third parties against each other, such that, for instance, the defendant could not take part in a class action suit against the RIAA under the proposed settlement. Given that the defense lawyer suggested he would be amenable to confidentiality on the actual terms of the settlement, we may never know the details.
If, on the other hand, the RIAA dismissed without settling, I would imagine the defendant will counter-sue for legal fees, etc.