> then what is the basis for a belief that a government run solution would be better?
The lower infant mortality, longer lifespans, and lower cost _averaged across the population_ of other countries. As much as we poke fun at the UK and Canada's health services, they do better jobs overall with day-to-day care. It's the extraordinary cases, such as the first diagnosed AIDS cases, where American health care leads. That pot of money in insurance systems that haven't figured out how to disallow coverage of expensive new treatments, and the regulations that cover insurance to cover such expensive cases, really help leading edge new technologies. But look straight at mortality rates to see if such erratic genius provides generally effective treatment.
Oh, I like "The Spirit" too. You may be older than me: I didn't get to read those growing up. But the comics have had various smaller print versions for quite a few decades that are worth reading for unusual political bents and a far broader education than the mainstream comic books provide.
When will a pony show up and dance the lambada? This has _nothing_ to do with the length of encryption keys, and everything to do with fine-grained data access. Unfortunately, a lot of apps were developed first, and security only thought of later. (Yes, I'm talking about CVS and Subversion and Jabber.) The results are predictable: personal data is not encrypted, and is shared freely to the local filesystem because the developers are not given the time, and the apps are not given the resources, to protect the data more thoroughly.
This data _should not have been accessible_ to unauthorized applications, true. But encryption in limited hardware like an Iphone is painful to provide at all, due to the speed and space limitations. 2048 is hardly necessary: most such data lives in plain-text, because the authors believe that its your operating system's problem, not yours. (Go look at Subversion's storage of plain-text passwords to see where this leads.)
It's not the only reason. The American software patent system is, fundamentally, insane unless you're a large corporation that can afford a suite of patents large enough to provide Mutual Assured Destruction for anyone who sues you. But the NVidia kernel drivers, Microsoft's McCarthy-like claim of "47 infringing patents" and the lack of software patents in Europe made software patents important to deal with.
Similar problems are inherent in Microsoft's Palladium digital rights management system, relabeled "Trusted Computing". The idea that it is for "protection" is naive and not based on looking at how the software works: it's designed to block software, and files, and _hardware_ from working with anything else but vendor authorized components.
> Health care in this country is about the best in the world.
I'm afraid it's not. Our health care for the working poor is pitiful, and our infant mortality rates are shocking for an industrialized nation. Where we lead is in in fundamentally elective surgery: plastic surgery, bleeding edge technologies which desperate sufferers will try in desperate circumstances and lead to new techniques and technologies, and new pharmacological treatments due to our favorable patent protections for companies that develop them. But many of the results are wasteful, and for a nationwide policy foolish.
Many modern societies do consider basic health care a "right" as a citizen. And they tax to pay for it: a lot of craziness comes in when it becomes burdensomely micromanaged by bureaucrats whose concerns are paperwork first, money second, staff next, and the patients last.
Oh, dear. You never read various of the underground comics, did you? From the "Jack Chick" tracts to the "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers" to "The Spirit", many cartoons have been educational and politically non-standard.
Do you remember the old laser disc game, "The Dragon's Lair"? The sound track was very linked to events in the game: only two of them, where the scene would be reversed left-right randomly. I actually saw someone play it blindfolded, as proof that it could be done, with the cheering crowd telling him to go left or right for that pair of scenes.
Considering the existence of laws such as the "The Artists' Rights and Theft Prevention Act of 2005", the "The Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999", and various others, it seems clear that the US Congress disagrees with you.
Oh, dear. I'm not saying the Mandriva maintainers are backwards, just understandably cautious. Mandriva is a publicly traded company: Debian is many interesting and very useful things, but a publicly traded company doesn't seem to be one of them: this makes Mandriva more vulnerable to lawsuits about just this sort of thing.
Having to figure out what is and isn't legal with the DMCA, and regulations like it, is an unreasonable legal burden for the creators of Mandriva. The DMCA is strange law, and it's safer to simply leave emulators out of the basic distribution.
There is a wonderful location for software whose licenses make it difficult to include in Mandriva, such as libdvdcss for reading DVD's in the USA, emulators for game consoles because Mandriva won't incorporate them directly to avoid US DMCA legal issues, and Dan Bernstein's oddball tools whose licenses used to prevent rebundling. It's called the Penguin Liberation Front, it's built around Mandriva, and its source RPM's are convenient for any RPM based distro that wants access to these tools.
I find it extremely handy because it has old, weird tools like xv and vtwm for which I sadly miss development.
If you look back to the old David LaMacchia case, the FBI tried to convict someone running a secretive FSP site on school computers of conspiracy and software theft. It was obvious he was guilty as sin at running a pirate software site, but because he received no money for it (merely stole school resources of bandwidth and computer time), they failed miserably to convict him.
This idiot, according to the FBI, asked on a bulletin board for the necessary MAC addresses for the Phoenix Arizona area. That was inviting illegal behavior. This is why I don't even make _jokes_ like that about pirating software or computer cracking: because I've explained to people how easy it is to do, I have to keep my nose clean lest someone testify against me.
Yes, detailed display format is a critical feature of PDF. This is key to why it will it's not appropriate for indexing and stable long-term storage: the visual detail actively interferes with its stability and reliability.
Whoa, slow down. I judge Perl, as a language, as teaching poor practices because there are _so many_ ways to do the most simple tasks, and because it tacitly encourages local rewriting of modules that are then woven into other people's modules. For examples, look at the dozens and dozens of modules at CPAN for handling time. Oh, dear, many of those are pitiful, and it's very difficult to decommission them. Bad C and C++ code tends not to _propagate_ this way.
The result is an incredible waste of time when someone like me has to go clean up the debris. Perl is an extremely powerful scripting language: I wish that bash had a fraction of its flexibility and string handling capability, or that C was remotely as easy to write and test a small module with or to load and review modules.
Printing documents created in other language versions of Acrobat. In particular, the Adobe Acrobat for German created documents that were not only unviewable in a normal Acrobat viewer, but when used to "print PDF" for MS Word documents, created documents that actually crashed Windows computers. The Acrobat for Hebrew didn't crash Windows with the printed documents, but was filled with layout errors when rendered even by Acrobat Reader, errors that didn't show up in the Adobe Acrobat tool. Much of this may have been fixed with the latest release, but I'm not spending nor suggesting that my peers overseas spend all the money needed to upgrade.
Getting our colleagues to stop using Acrobat and use _anything else_ to generate their documents, and use PDFCreator to print them as PDF, stabilized the situation enough for us to generate the documents we needed. It didn't provide PDF forms for people to fill out, which was its only flaw.
Slow up. While the overall concept is reasonable, mil-spec computers are _tiny_ in resources. They have to be: getting them mil-spec approved is a lengthy process, and radiation hardening CPU's and microprocessors is very difficult. The bigger the chip in resources, or the smaller the traces, the more radiation vulnerable. And for an interception missile, the available payload to carry shielding for the electronics is miniscule if it exists at all. So competent military programmers learn to be very, very parsimonious indeed in their code.
They also tend to write in C or even assembly, for optimization to their very limited hardware. There have been attempts to use all sorts of other languages for such processors, but they keep coming back to C.
Amen. I've had a number of instances in my career where computer science students and graduates were very carefully taught _never_ to look beyond their own little set task, their own little function, to dig deeper for where the errors might be creeping in. The result is not only ignorance of the lower levels of actual digital computation, but a refusal to check results from those other modules or awareness that such errors occur.
And oh, dear God, if I never have to peel apart another badly written Perl module that's re-inventing the wheel for numeric calculations and getting the rounding wrong or introducing new fencepost errors, I would.... I'd have to stop insulting Perl programmers for at least a week.
PDF remains difficult to manage. Like MS Word documents, an incredible amount of resources is wasted in display information rather than actual text or graphical content. Unlike MS Word, they're parseable: but unfortunately like MS Word, the commercial vendor-sold document creation tool (Adobe Acrobat) generates unstable and unreliable content that interacts very badly with other tools. Oddly, the ghostscript created PDF remains very stable and legible, and tools like "PDFCreator" which uses ghostscript creates long-term viable PDF printouts of other document formats. I use it for complex MS Word documents that cannot be handled by other software, even different versions of MS Word.
Adobe can actually do better with this, and I hope that they will in the future. But it's not stable enough to be reliably indexed or viewable even 5 years in the future, much less 10 or 20 or 100 such as may be needed for legal or historical documents.
Flash, you're quite right. Unless they open up the source, it has no business as yet another document format.
Oh, dear. This was not my experience: the TA stipends were ridiculously small in my field. So several of my TA's were Asian and Middle Eastern students, who were not very competent in English or in teaching but were excellent at sucking up to the instructor and doing things exactly the way the instructor wanted on exams, had very little real insight into their fields, and spoke very poor English, but whose college was funded by their nations or their families.
The result was predictable: poor help with the material, poor comprehension of their badly accented English, and no exploration of material not directly on the exam. The unpredicted result was that they drove female students out of the program en masse: several of them simply ignored women in class, deprecating their results and only condescendingly acknowledging their work when forced to, and consistently grading them lower. And there was also the particular well-funded, foreign-born TA who kept trying to date all the "loose American women": there were few enough women in the field that they didn't have peers to help them stand up against the abuse, and several left the program.
I went to the instructors about some of these problems, especially the thick accents and the sexual harassment: I _wanted_ people to learn, and for women to join my scientific field. But I couldn't afford to work as a TA, the stipend was _far_ too small to pay my expenses: I like to be able to eat at least twice a day.
Google email normally gets fed through 'smtp.google.com' with your 'user@gmail.com' account name, with SMTPAUTH authentication, doesn't it? I thought the problem for Google groups was the NNTP part, which is much more tolerant of forgery, and which they've completely failed to implement even basic controls on. (Understandably: spammers and abusers can waste millions of dollars of lawyer fees screaming about censorship, and have done so in the past.)
I'm afraid that Google is unwilling to accept 'Cancel' messages, which most competent ISP's have accepted as a necessary price of carrying NNTP. Yes, many NNTP groups at Google have become utterly unusable due to the spam about shoes, Viagra, pirated software, and who knows what else.
Google groups was nice while it lasted, but unless they can accept that blocking spam is worth the risk of lawsuits due to people being unhappy about being blocked, it's useless.
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> then what is the basis for a belief that a government run solution would be better?
The lower infant mortality, longer lifespans, and lower cost _averaged across the population_ of other countries. As much as we poke fun at the UK and Canada's health services, they do better jobs overall with day-to-day care. It's the extraordinary cases, such as the first diagnosed AIDS cases, where American health care leads. That pot of money in insurance systems that haven't figured out how to disallow coverage of expensive new treatments, and the regulations that cover insurance to cover such expensive cases, really help leading edge new technologies. But look straight at mortality rates to see if such erratic genius provides generally effective treatment.
Oh, I like "The Spirit" too. You may be older than me: I didn't get to read those growing up. But the comics have had various smaller print versions for quite a few decades that are worth reading for unusual political bents and a far broader education than the mainstream comic books provide.
When will a pony show up and dance the lambada? This has _nothing_ to do with the length of encryption keys, and everything to do with fine-grained data access. Unfortunately, a lot of apps were developed first, and security only thought of later. (Yes, I'm talking about CVS and Subversion and Jabber.) The results are predictable: personal data is not encrypted, and is shared freely to the local filesystem because the developers are not given the time, and the apps are not given the resources, to protect the data more thoroughly.
This data _should not have been accessible_ to unauthorized applications, true. But encryption in limited hardware like an Iphone is painful to provide at all, due to the speed and space limitations. 2048 is hardly necessary: most such data lives in plain-text, because the authors believe that its your operating system's problem, not yours. (Go look at Subversion's storage of plain-text passwords to see where this leads.)
OpenSSH doesn't have this behavior, it uses your system's normal passwords.. It's the particular Iphone-ported application.
It's not the only reason. The American software patent system is, fundamentally, insane unless you're a large corporation that can afford a suite of patents large enough to provide Mutual Assured Destruction for anyone who sues you. But the NVidia kernel drivers, Microsoft's McCarthy-like claim of "47 infringing patents" and the lack of software patents in Europe made software patents important to deal with.
Similar problems are inherent in Microsoft's Palladium digital rights management system, relabeled "Trusted Computing". The idea that it is for "protection" is naive and not based on looking at how the software works: it's designed to block software, and files, and _hardware_ from working with anything else but vendor authorized components.
> Health care in this country is about the best in the world.
I'm afraid it's not. Our health care for the working poor is pitiful, and our infant mortality rates are shocking for an industrialized nation. Where we lead is in in fundamentally elective surgery: plastic surgery, bleeding edge technologies which desperate sufferers will try in desperate circumstances and lead to new techniques and technologies, and new pharmacological treatments due to our favorable patent protections for companies that develop them. But many of the results are wasteful, and for a nationwide policy foolish.
Many modern societies do consider basic health care a "right" as a citizen. And they tax to pay for it: a lot of craziness comes in when it becomes burdensomely micromanaged by bureaucrats whose concerns are paperwork first, money second, staff next, and the patients last.
Oh, dear. You never read various of the underground comics, did you? From the "Jack Chick" tracts to the "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers" to "The Spirit", many cartoons have been educational and politically non-standard.
Do you remember the old laser disc game, "The Dragon's Lair"? The sound track was very linked to events in the game: only two of them, where the scene would be reversed left-right randomly. I actually saw someone play it blindfolded, as proof that it could be done, with the cheering crowd telling him to go left or right for that pair of scenes.
Considering the existence of laws such as the "The Artists' Rights and Theft Prevention Act of 2005", the "The Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999", and various others, it seems clear that the US Congress disagrees with you.
Have you examined that weird pinout they use for RS-232 on RJ-45 connectors? It's the combination of any 2 features that they do oddly.
Oh, dear. I'm not saying the Mandriva maintainers are backwards, just understandably cautious. Mandriva is a publicly traded company: Debian is many interesting and very useful things, but a publicly traded company doesn't seem to be one of them: this makes Mandriva more vulnerable to lawsuits about just this sort of thing.
Having to figure out what is and isn't legal with the DMCA, and regulations like it, is an unreasonable legal burden for the creators of Mandriva. The DMCA is strange law, and it's safer to simply leave emulators out of the basic distribution.
There is a wonderful location for software whose licenses make it difficult to include in Mandriva, such as libdvdcss for reading DVD's in the USA, emulators for game consoles because Mandriva won't incorporate them directly to avoid US DMCA legal issues, and Dan Bernstein's oddball tools whose licenses used to prevent rebundling. It's called the Penguin Liberation Front, it's built around Mandriva, and its source RPM's are convenient for any RPM based distro that wants access to these tools.
I find it extremely handy because it has old, weird tools like xv and vtwm for which I sadly miss development.
If you look back to the old David LaMacchia case, the FBI tried to convict someone running a secretive FSP site on school computers of conspiracy and software theft. It was obvious he was guilty as sin at running a pirate software site, but because he received no money for it (merely stole school resources of bandwidth and computer time), they failed miserably to convict him.
This idiot, according to the FBI, asked on a bulletin board for the necessary MAC addresses for the Phoenix Arizona area. That was inviting illegal behavior. This is why I don't even make _jokes_ like that about pirating software or computer cracking: because I've explained to people how easy it is to do, I have to keep my nose clean lest someone testify against me.
Yes, detailed display format is a critical feature of PDF. This is key to why it will it's not appropriate for indexing and stable long-term storage: the visual detail actively interferes with its stability and reliability.
Whoa, slow down. I judge Perl, as a language, as teaching poor practices because there are _so many_ ways to do the most simple tasks, and because it tacitly encourages local rewriting of modules that are then woven into other people's modules. For examples, look at the dozens and dozens of modules at CPAN for handling time. Oh, dear, many of those are pitiful, and it's very difficult to decommission them. Bad C and C++ code tends not to _propagate_ this way.
The result is an incredible waste of time when someone like me has to go clean up the debris. Perl is an extremely powerful scripting language: I wish that bash had a fraction of its flexibility and string handling capability, or that C was remotely as easy to write and test a small module with or to load and review modules.
Printing documents created in other language versions of Acrobat. In particular, the Adobe Acrobat for German created documents that were not only unviewable in a normal Acrobat viewer, but when used to "print PDF" for MS Word documents, created documents that actually crashed Windows computers. The Acrobat for Hebrew didn't crash Windows with the printed documents, but was filled with layout errors when rendered even by Acrobat Reader, errors that didn't show up in the Adobe Acrobat tool. Much of this may have been fixed with the latest release, but I'm not spending nor suggesting that my peers overseas spend all the money needed to upgrade.
Getting our colleagues to stop using Acrobat and use _anything else_ to generate their documents, and use PDFCreator to print them as PDF, stabilized the situation enough for us to generate the documents we needed. It didn't provide PDF forms for people to fill out, which was its only flaw.
Slow up. While the overall concept is reasonable, mil-spec computers are _tiny_ in resources. They have to be: getting them mil-spec approved is a lengthy process, and radiation hardening CPU's and microprocessors is very difficult. The bigger the chip in resources, or the smaller the traces, the more radiation vulnerable. And for an interception missile, the available payload to carry shielding for the electronics is miniscule if it exists at all. So competent military programmers learn to be very, very parsimonious indeed in their code.
They also tend to write in C or even assembly, for optimization to their very limited hardware. There have been attempts to use all sorts of other languages for such processors, but they keep coming back to C.
Amen. I've had a number of instances in my career where computer science students and graduates were very carefully taught _never_ to look beyond their own little set task, their own little function, to dig deeper for where the errors might be creeping in. The result is not only ignorance of the lower levels of actual digital computation, but a refusal to check results from those other modules or awareness that such errors occur.
And oh, dear God, if I never have to peel apart another badly written Perl module that's re-inventing the wheel for numeric calculations and getting the rounding wrong or introducing new fencepost errors, I would.... I'd have to stop insulting Perl programmers for at least a week.
PDF remains difficult to manage. Like MS Word documents, an incredible amount of resources is wasted in display information rather than actual text or graphical content. Unlike MS Word, they're parseable: but unfortunately like MS Word, the commercial vendor-sold document creation tool (Adobe Acrobat) generates unstable and unreliable content that interacts very badly with other tools. Oddly, the ghostscript created PDF remains very stable and legible, and tools like "PDFCreator" which uses ghostscript creates long-term viable PDF printouts of other document formats. I use it for complex MS Word documents that cannot be handled by other software, even different versions of MS Word.
Adobe can actually do better with this, and I hope that they will in the future. But it's not stable enough to be reliably indexed or viewable even 5 years in the future, much less 10 or 20 or 100 such as may be needed for legal or historical documents.
Flash, you're quite right. Unless they open up the source, it has no business as yet another document format.
It's not easy, but I've succeeded in a few cases.
If we can train people use fewer buzzwords despite their MBA, we can teach them to drive better despite their genes.
Oh, dear. This was not my experience: the TA stipends were ridiculously small in my field. So several of my TA's were Asian and Middle Eastern students, who were not very competent in English or in teaching but were excellent at sucking up to the instructor and doing things exactly the way the instructor wanted on exams, had very little real insight into their fields, and spoke very poor English, but whose college was funded by their nations or their families.
The result was predictable: poor help with the material, poor comprehension of their badly accented English, and no exploration of material not directly on the exam. The unpredicted result was that they drove female students out of the program en masse: several of them simply ignored women in class, deprecating their results and only condescendingly acknowledging their work when forced to, and consistently grading them lower. And there was also the particular well-funded, foreign-born TA who kept trying to date all the "loose American women": there were few enough women in the field that they didn't have peers to help them stand up against the abuse, and several left the program.
I went to the instructors about some of these problems, especially the thick accents and the sexual harassment: I _wanted_ people to learn, and for women to join my scientific field. But I couldn't afford to work as a TA, the stipend was _far_ too small to pay my expenses: I like to be able to eat at least twice a day.
Google email normally gets fed through 'smtp.google.com' with your 'user@gmail.com' account name, with SMTPAUTH authentication, doesn't it? I thought the problem for Google groups was the NNTP part, which is much more tolerant of forgery, and which they've completely failed to implement even basic controls on. (Understandably: spammers and abusers can waste millions of dollars of lawyer fees screaming about censorship, and have done so in the past.)
I'm afraid that Google is unwilling to accept 'Cancel' messages, which most competent ISP's have accepted as a necessary price of carrying NNTP. Yes, many NNTP groups at Google have become utterly unusable due to the spam about shoes, Viagra, pirated software, and who knows what else.
Google groups was nice while it lasted, but unless they can accept that blocking spam is worth the risk of lawsuits due to people being unhappy about being blocked, it's useless.