With RAID, I don't lose all my data (or, if I take regular backups, all the data since the last backup) in the event that a drive fails, as long as I...
In general (not replying you your otherwise quite correct post, please don't feel browbeaten) I really wonder
a) why anyone would need the additional uptime in an in-home setting
The uptime isn't the reason for using RAID at home. Data integrity is.
With RAID, I don't lose all my data (or, if I take regular backups, all the data since the last backup) in the event that a drive fails, as long as I . A good RAID-5 setup will give me better read speeds than a single disk, at the cost of some write speed. Since reads are generally much more common than writes on a home system, this is an overall win.
However, these days disks are big enough that a RAID 0 configuration is reasonable, and that's what I have now. I get better write speeds and similar read speeds.
In any case, backups are no substitute for a good RAID setup. In fact, I would argue that the home situation is much more appropriate for RAID, because there simply is no good backup solution for home use -- hard disks are orders of magnitude larger than any reasonably-priced backup medium you can find. Only businesses can afford the kind of backup solutions that are capable of backing up the amount of data that's typical on a home system today without burning through a bunch of backup media.
and
b) what the point of a generic IDE raid5 is anyway. When one drive dies, the system keeps running with the hotspare. On a commercial array (or using hot-pluggable storage like firewire) you can pull out the bad drive, put in a new one, and the system rebuilds that as the hotspare, all without any loss of service. But with regular ATA (and I guess SATA, although I'm not so sure) you can't hotswap, so you have to powerdown the array to swap in the new drive - at which point the reliability you got from RAID5 is gone. Hmm, well, I suppose it's less downtime than you'd have restoring from backups, but it's questionable if that's worth the ongoing performance hit the RAID5 (even a hardware one) would cause.
Downtime isn't an issue for home use anyway. But loss of data is. That's why RAID solutions without hotswap capability are perfectly adequate for home use.
Generally for situations where you really need to make sure the data stays safe, I'd just stick with hardware. If you can spend that much on some harddrives, I don't see why you can't spend the money on hardware.
I disagree with this. Here's why: the most important thing is your data. Hardware RAID works fine until the controller dies. Once that happens, you must replace it with the same type of controller, or your data is basically gone, because each manufacturer uses its own proprietary way of storing the RAID metadata.
Software RAID doesn't have that problem. If a controller dies, you can buy a completely different one and it just won't matter: the data on your disk is at this point just blocks that are addressable with a new controller in the same way that they were before.
Another advantage is that software RAID allows you to use any kind of disk as a RAID element. If you can put a partition on it, you can use it (as long as the partition meets the size constraints). So you can build a RAID set out of, e.g., a standard IDE drive and a serial ATA drive. The kernel doesn't care -- it's just a block device as far as it's concerned. The end result is that you can spread the risk of failure not just across drives but across controllers as well.
That kind of flexibility simply doesn't exist in hardware RAID. In my opinion, it's worth a lot.
That said, hardware RAID does have its advantages -- good implementations offload some of the computing burden from the CPU, and really good ones will deal with hotswapping disks automatically. But keep in mind that dynamic configuration of the hardware RAID device (operations such as telling it what to do with the disk you just swapped into it) is something that has to be supported by the operating system driver itself and a set of utilities designed to work specifically with that driver. Otherwise you have to take the entire system down in order to do such reconfiguration (most hardware RAID cards have a BIOS utility for such things).
Oh, one other advantage in favor of software RAID: it allows you to take advantage of Moore's Law much more easily. Replace the motherboard/CPU in your system and suddenly your RAID can be faster. Whether it is or not depends on whether or not your previous rig was capable of saturating the disks. With hardware RAID, if the controller isn't capable of saturating the disks out of the box, then you'll never get the maximum performance possible out of the disks you connect to it, even if you have the fastest motherboard/CPU combination on the planet.
I think it's amazing that a country willing to go to war for democracy and willing to give more then a 1000 lives for the cause won't stop using a company that has shady at best electorial system.
The U.S. didn't go to war for democracy -- that's just the Claim of the Day. The U.S. went to war for money and power. And the elections are basically being rigged for money and power. Funny how the motives are so consistent -- it's almost as if the same people were involved. Oh, wait...
(And yes, the Democrats are no different, because the people who are really behind all this, those who run the megacorporations in the U.S., control both parties and use that control to give the appearance of a choice to the voters).
Was that I was watching the local news (Washington, DC) and they were discussing electronic voting machines and some of the concerns surrounding them. Then, the reporter ends his report basically blowing the concerns off and saying it was just people were afraid of computers raising a fuss. What? It seems to me that the more people know about computers and know about the systems, the more concerned they are. It's not people afraid of computers and to be dismissed like that simply blows my mind.
Lemme guess: the reporter works for one of the media organizations owned by one of the large media corporations.
It is in the interests of large corporations to be able to rig elections, because large corporations don't like uncertainty. Repeat that until it sinks in.
The reporter may actually believe that there are no worrisome issues with the election machines, but my bet is that his corporate masters told him not to say anything else, under pain of being fired and blacklisted (anyone who believe that under-the-table blacklists don't exist is kidding himself).
The U.S. media organizations are the only ones that I'm aware of that aren't worried about the voting machines being used for this election. That should tell you something.
As a large technology company, Google has a vested interest in perpetuating the perversion that passes for our patent system.
Which would be a very interesting stance to take indeed, given their founders' mantra of "don't be evil".
Make no mistake: intentionally supporting a system that does more harm than good (and based on the way the patent system is used today, it would be difficult indeed to argue that the patent system on the whole does more good than harm, and relatively easy to argue that it does more harm than good) is evil.
The nature of the system as it is right now forces the participants to play. But I see little reason why the participants can't speak out against the system, all the while participating in it, as long as they use the system in a defensive manner only.
Bullshit. An industry association of record labels doesn't constitute 'authority' under any accepted colloqial or legal definition of the word. It's an interest group, nothing more.
An interest group that has significant control over the government is a de-facto 'authority' regardless of whether or not it happens to fit the strict colloquial or legal definition of the word.
Sorry, but how things play out in the real world is much more relevant than what the definitions of the words are.
Journalists in the US aren't murdered, they have it too easy, and as a result, they're soft - soft on the truth - and letting the government tell them what they can and cannot know.
Journalists don't let the government tell them what they can and cannot know -- they let their corporate masters tell them that. If they didn't, they'd quickly find themselves without a job. Their corporate masters are now so firmly in control of the government that there's little difference, but what little difference exists is of vital importance.
Their corporate masters are in firm control of the government because you simply cannot (meaning the odds are so low that they're not worth considering anymore) get elected to a national position in the U.S. today without "help" from those same corporate masters, since those corporate masters control what gets published by the mass media and what doesn't.
This is a situation that has no solution short of revolution, and today revolution can't succeed because the government has millions of times more firepower than the citizenry.
Welcome to the 21st century, citizen. Enjoy your stay. Just remember to do what you're told.
It looks that 30-40 years ago anyone at least considered the question of "what is good for the public interest". What has changed in America since then?
What's changed is that over that period of time, large corporations managed to achieve a stranglehold over most mass media outlets, so that now all the mass media of any consequence is owned by large corporations.
Large corporations don't give a crap about the public interest, only corporate interests, which are:
Control
Power
Money
which is achieved by:
A captive market
Most (if not all) of those things are at odds with the public interest, and so consideration of the public interest has to disappear, according to the corporate worldview, which today is the same as the government's worldview, since the elected members of the government can no longer be elected without the "help" of the large corporations.
You'd have to have locks if something else is updating the same files.
Only if the same blocks are being updated by multiple processes, in which case the processes in question should have to go through some sort of arbitration API or, at least, notify the kernel that they don't want transaction support for the operations on those files.
In the general case, if multiple processes are trying to touch the same file at the same time (which, in this case, means within the period of time the transactions in question overlap), then one of them should lose, whether it's via an error or by blocking.
Guess that means there would have to be some additions made to, e.g., fcntl, to make it possible to say whether to block or return an error on a file operation that touches the same data as another in-progress transaction.
There are several FS like this, but you don't know of them because they require completely new FS API to work with.
Why is that? There's nothing inherently impossible about having the OS remember, via a transaction log, the changes that have taken place to a set of files made by a process, and then either committing them all or rolling back all of them at process exit time (or whenever the process does a commit() or rollback()). The file operations themselves can be identical, so all you really need are those 4 additional operations I mentioned previously.
...and that I haven't seen in any file system announced to date, is a way of bundling multiple filesystem operations into a single atomic transaction that can be rolled back. This would clearly require an addition of four system calls (one to begin a transaction, one to commit it, one to roll it back, and one to set the default action, commit or rollback, on exit).
Such a feature would rock, because it would be possible to make things like installers completely atomic: interrupt the installer process and the whole thing rolls back.
Okay, to be fair to Nature this was a written interview, so they didn't really have much choice, but this style of political interview is pretty much all you see in the US.
1. Politician is asked a question.
2. Politician gives a stirring mostly pre-prepared speech that may even have some vague relevance to the question asked.
3. Interviewer moves on to the next question.
What's with that?!
Any interviewer organization that attempted to ask real questions instead of doing the above would quickly find itself unable to gain "access" to said politician anymore, and would thus become "irrelevant" in the political news world, which means less money for the organization. Unless, of course, said organization is one of the big corporate networks, in which case, the organization will treat the politician with kid gloves because the corporation has a vested interest in making sure that candidate doesn't come off looking bad against the other minor candidates that are also running (you'll note that the way these organizations treat third-party candidates and others that aren't in favor with the corporations is much different than how they treat the primary candidates).
Ignoring that companies really can't be evil or good
Really? Tell me, what exactly is the difference between someone who is greedy and is willing to do anything at all (as long as they either don't get caught or don't lose anything significant when they do) in order to satisfy that greed, and someone who is evil?
I don't think there's any real difference at all.
And since the behavior of many corporations (Diebold, Microsoft, many RIAA members, etc., etc.) is almost exactly described by the above, I think it's perfectly reasonable to call them "evil". Certainly if you were to evaluate their behavior as if they were people, you'd conclude without a doubt that they're psychopaths.
Rather than spend a considerable amount of time and effort in a vain attempt to foil copyright violators, try simply putting out a decent product at a fair price. Those who are honest (who, I think, are most of us) will be willing to pay for something they believe is fairly priced, and those who are dishonest won't be willing to pay for something no matter what -- they'll do everything in their power to illicitly copy it instead.
Honestly, I suspect that the return on the money wasted on fighting copyright infringement by fringe elements is far less than the amount actually spent fighting it.
That's because people who are technologically adept and who have sufficient resources are quite rare. Only someone who can hack the hardware would be able to grab the original digital content from a properly-designed black box.
I suspect that hardware like this will, in time (if not immediately), be used to enforce pay-per-view or something like that for permanent media. From the info page:
The basic control paradigm for SVP is "Content X for Device Y in Time window Z. " This means that content X can be viewed only on the target (approved Y) device and only during the broadcaster-specified time window (which can range from 'immediate view only' until 'forever' Z).
Yep, sounds like pay-per-view to me.
It really is only a matter of time before everything that's available falls under the control of something like this...
So without any new input, I'll just jump into the flamefest, and say that as an economic "problem", outsourcing is identical to technological advancement. If a computer takes someone job, most Slashdotters would cheer. But if that replacement's name is Apu instead of Bender, suddenly people are screaming. I ask: WTF is the difference?
The difference is this: a computer taking someone's job represents a real productivity improvement -- something is being produced for much less in man hours, not just dollars. The end result is a real increase in efficiency. The person losing their job loses it because the job itself is no longer necessary, because the economy just got more efficient. This is good for everyone because an increase in efficiency means a reduction in the real cost -- in man hours -- of production.
Offshoring does no such thing. Indeed, one could easily argue that offshoring actually increases costs, and thus decreases efficiency, because you not only have to pay for the labor of the person doing the work, but also have to pay for the increased costs of communication. Those costs will drop over time, but they'll always be there.
What offshoring does is transfer wealth. You lose your job, and thus lose the ability to pay for goods and services, just like before. The money saved goes in part to pay for someone else's salary, and the rest goes towards increased profits for the executives and shareholders. But the economy itself doesn't gain a thing as a result of all this, because there is no efficiency gain involved, just a transfer of wealth.
Furthermore, the fact that some of the money is now going overseas while the rest of it goes to people who are the least likely to spend it in the local economy means that the local economy must suffer as a result. The fact that some of the money involved is going overseas means that the local customer base must erode over time.
And all this is because economics really is a zero-sum game after you eliminate population growth and real efficiency gains, because economics is ultimately about the exchange of human labor (if you take any economic exchange, you can always eventually trace it back to an exchange of one person's time for another person's time).
Natural uranium is only slightly radioactive. It has to by mined in huge quantities and purified to produce weapons grade uranium and reactor fuel.
So what would you wind up with if you dilute the waste by the same amount that the original uranium was?
Most of the waste we are talking about here isn't uranium, its plutonium and a host of other exotic metals and isotopes. Plutonium is lethal in extremely small quantities, and with reprocessing its highly sought after to produce nuclear weapons or dirty bombs.
And said plutonium can't itself be used in reactors to generate power?
If you can cause it to fission in a chain reaction (a requirement to build a bomb), you can use it to power a reactor, as long as you have an appropriate neutron moderator.
Like most things you dump in the ground there is a high probability some of its going to end up in the ground water which people drink, and is used in agriculture to grow food for people to eat.
Sure. But that in itself isn't a problem. It's only a problem when it appears in food and water in concentrations high enough to matter. If the stuff is dilute enough, then that won't be a problem unless there's some sort of natural concentration process happening. Furthermore, it appears that the only toxicity danger of plutonium even worth talking about is that when the plutonium is inhaled. That can be prevented by using the proper method of processing said plutonium.
In any case, none of this is an issue if you use said plutonium as reactor fuel in a properly designed reactor, since at that point the plutonium in question would only present a danger to the people operating the plant or transporting the fuel.
That leaves the other exotic materials generated by the fission process, which obviously have to addressed on an individual basis.
One key assumption many have is that economics is a zero-sum game.
On a per-person basis, economics basically is a zero-sum game, with one exception: productivity improvements through technology.
The study of economics is the study of the exchange of labor. I do for you, you do for someone else, they do for me, etc. Money is the means of representing that labor.
Offshoring does nothing to increase real productivity. The number of man-hours required to perform a given task is the same whether it's done overseas or in the U.S. The only thing that differs is the cost of living, and the only reason that differs is that the standard of living differs. The standard of living is basically the amount of resources an individual has available to him over and above the bare minimum necessary to survive.
It should be trivially obvious that economics is essentially a zero sum game: when you pay someone for their services, the amount of money they gain from the transaction is the same as the amount of money you lose from the transaction. This is true for every single monetary transaction. The money you recieve is the result of labor you expend, and the money you spend is in exchange for the labor of another. And except for the process of printing money, the total supply of money in the economy is fixed. In fact, the economy tends to automatically adjust to an increase in the money supply: goods and services become more "expensive" as a result -- inflation, in other words.
What varies is how equitable the labor exchange is. In other words, how much labor one person is doing in order to pay for the labor of another. If it takes me one hour of my time to pay for a day's worth of someone else's labor, then I'm on the winning side of that exchange and the other person is on the losing side.
Offshoring ultimately increases the amount of inequity of the labor transactions involved, because the employers are paying less in exchange for the same amount of labor. Their goal is to pay as little as possible for the maximum amount of labor possible, and by making use of offshoring they will be able to drive the price of labor to the point where the amount of money they pay to acquire a day's worth of labor from a person is barely enough to pay for a day's worth of subsistence.
A laborer who is paid that little is known as a slave.
The reason offshoring makes this possible is that it is an end-run around labor laws. In the U.S., employers must pay their employees a minimum wage and must operate within certain limits on how much work they can demand from their employees, what conditions their employees can operate in, etc. All of those protections disappear when offshoring happens. The end result is that people in the U.S., who live under such laws, must now compete with people elsewhere who don't. Both sides lose, as the people who don't live under such laws are subject to the abuses that such laws are designed to protect against, and the people who do live under such laws become jobless. The employers will place the economies of entire contries in competition with each other, with the standard of living being the only variable that can be manipulated. When there's strong downward pressure on the standard of living, the standard of living will fall. It must. And all the while, those who run the corporations that are driving the competition will become richer, and all at the expense of the people they employ.
And all that will happen because economics is a zero-sum game in this situation, because offshoring does not increase real productivity. Because real productivity is the amount of work a person can do within a given period of time.
If anything, offshoring will reduce real productivity in the short term, and possibly in the long term as well, because it will be cheaper in the short term to pay people to perform a task directly than to develop the technology to perform the task automatically.
The point is that the people whose jobs are outsourced are not competitive. Whether you like it or not, it IS a global economy and when somebody else will do your job for less money, employing you instead puts your employer in a disadvantageous position. The competition will exploit this and drive your employer out of the market. The effect is the same: You're out of a job.
Yep. And the cheapest labor is that of a slave or prisoner who is being given barely enough to eat. Once you know that, you know that's exactly where the global job market is headed, as long as those countries that use slave/prison labor (China?) are allowed to participate in the competition.
That is why offshoring must be limited: the competition doesn't have to follow the same rules you do, and that inherently makes for a tilted playing field. The competition has no incentive to change their ways (they're more "competitive" than you, after all), so you're forced to adopt their ways. That means other countries that wish to compete in the global market must start making use of slave/prison labor, and that puts pressure on the governments to increase the size of their prison labor pool, which puts pressure on them to put more people in prison.
No, offshoring is acceptable only when the target countries have the same labor laws on the books that you have. Otherwise you may as well throw out 100+ years of economic and labor progress (what, you think the middle class just magically appeared? It came about as a direct result of sane labor laws, because the use of automation virtually guarantees that there is more human labor available than work to do).
How about living somewhere besides the USA where when you get old, you die? After all, that is what is supposed to happen, isn't it?
You mean like how you're supposed to just hope that you don't get certain diseases rather than take the vaccine for them? Or that when you get a disease, you're supposed to tough it out instead of taking meds to attempt to deal with it? Or when you get some sort of internal injury, you're supposed to just live with it instead of getting surgery?
Sorry, but that's bullshit. Death by "natural causes" or "old age" is just another medical condition to be treated, a genetic deficiency to be cured. I see no point in going quietly into the night. Not when any chance for life is better than no chance. I mean, I can't dismiss the possibility of some sort of afterlife, but I'd be a real idiot to base any decisions on such a possibility.
As someone who started out on 0.25 MIPS CISC processors, I can comfortably say that you don't have the faintest idea what you are talking about. Abstraction layers appeared shortly after the stored-program architecture. 80 MIPS is serious, serious luxury.
<grumpy old man>
0.25 MIPS CISC? Luxury! Why, back in my day, we had to do the calculations in our heads and push the bits back and forth manually, uphill both ways too! And we liked it!
Worms target my Linux machine via port 80 about every 35 seconds (at least in the past two days, I don't feel like looking further back). I have blocked most of the local Comcast customers in my area through *A LOT* of/24 and/16. It doesn't seem to help too much. Either there are more and more infected machines or they just keep finding new hosts to attempt infection.
So don't run your web server on port 80. Run it on port 443, and set up SSL.
That way worms probably won't bother you nearly as much and you'll get a nice, secure connection to your system from wherever you are. Seriously, even the text-based browsers these days know how to do SSL.
One possible (and temporary) solution would be to salt the data somehow. This adds an extra layer of security because the hash you are looking at is a an unknown password AND an unknown data set which you (theoretically) have no access to. You can generate a data set that produces the same hash, but when submitting that data set it will be salted to generate a new hash that won't work. Think of it as a single math equation with two unknowns.
Well, maybe.
The reason you salt data (passwords in particular) is to prevent fast dictionary attacks, which only works when computing the hash is an expensive operation. If the hash is computed only on the plaintext and not (plaintext + salt) then you can precompute the hashes of a bunch of (relatively common) plaintext values. Then, you can quickly find out which plaintext produced the hash that you're trying to crack by looking the hash up in the precomputed hash table.
Salting prevents this by massively increasing the size of the required precomputed hash table. Now instead of storing N precomputed values, you have to store N * S, where S is the number of possible salt values. Password mechanisms which make use of salted values typically store the salt value along with the hash of the salted password. Not only does this potentially make a dictionary attack harder, it also prevents those who know the passwords in question from determining whether or not their password is the same as someone else's simply by examining the hash (the salt is supposed to introduce enough randomness to make this an unlikely occurrance).
Now, for this particular problem (finding a plaintext value which will generate the given hash via an exploitation of a weakness in the hash function itself), adding a salt may complicate things because it may add an additional constraint that has to be accounted for in the attack. I don't know enough to say whether or not that's even an issue in this particular case, however.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Sigh. Guess this is one of those days... :-(
I wrote:
The uptime isn't the reason for using RAID at home. Data integrity is.
With RAID, I don't lose all my data (or, if I take regular backups, all the data since the last backup) in the event that a drive fails, as long as I . A good RAID-5 setup will give me better read speeds than a single disk, at the cost of some write speed. Since reads are generally much more common than writes on a home system, this is an overall win.
However, these days disks are big enough that a RAID 0 configuration is reasonable, and that's what I have now. I get better write speeds and similar read speeds.
In any case, backups are no substitute for a good RAID setup. In fact, I would argue that the home situation is much more appropriate for RAID, because there simply is no good backup solution for home use -- hard disks are orders of magnitude larger than any reasonably-priced backup medium you can find. Only businesses can afford the kind of backup solutions that are capable of backing up the amount of data that's typical on a home system today without burning through a bunch of backup media.
Downtime isn't an issue for home use anyway. But loss of data is. That's why RAID solutions without hotswap capability are perfectly adequate for home use.
I disagree with this. Here's why: the most important thing is your data. Hardware RAID works fine until the controller dies. Once that happens, you must replace it with the same type of controller, or your data is basically gone, because each manufacturer uses its own proprietary way of storing the RAID metadata.
Software RAID doesn't have that problem. If a controller dies, you can buy a completely different one and it just won't matter: the data on your disk is at this point just blocks that are addressable with a new controller in the same way that they were before.
Another advantage is that software RAID allows you to use any kind of disk as a RAID element. If you can put a partition on it, you can use it (as long as the partition meets the size constraints). So you can build a RAID set out of, e.g., a standard IDE drive and a serial ATA drive. The kernel doesn't care -- it's just a block device as far as it's concerned. The end result is that you can spread the risk of failure not just across drives but across controllers as well.
That kind of flexibility simply doesn't exist in hardware RAID. In my opinion, it's worth a lot.
That said, hardware RAID does have its advantages -- good implementations offload some of the computing burden from the CPU, and really good ones will deal with hotswapping disks automatically. But keep in mind that dynamic configuration of the hardware RAID device (operations such as telling it what to do with the disk you just swapped into it) is something that has to be supported by the operating system driver itself and a set of utilities designed to work specifically with that driver. Otherwise you have to take the entire system down in order to do such reconfiguration (most hardware RAID cards have a BIOS utility for such things).
Oh, one other advantage in favor of software RAID: it allows you to take advantage of Moore's Law much more easily. Replace the motherboard/CPU in your system and suddenly your RAID can be faster. Whether it is or not depends on whether or not your previous rig was capable of saturating the disks. With hardware RAID, if the controller isn't capable of saturating the disks out of the box, then you'll never get the maximum performance possible out of the disks you connect to it, even if you have the fastest motherboard/CPU combination on the planet.
The U.S. didn't go to war for democracy -- that's just the Claim of the Day. The U.S. went to war for money and power. And the elections are basically being rigged for money and power. Funny how the motives are so consistent -- it's almost as if the same people were involved. Oh, wait...
(And yes, the Democrats are no different, because the people who are really behind all this, those who run the megacorporations in the U.S., control both parties and use that control to give the appearance of a choice to the voters).
Lemme guess: the reporter works for one of the media organizations owned by one of the large media corporations.
It is in the interests of large corporations to be able to rig elections, because large corporations don't like uncertainty. Repeat that until it sinks in.
The reporter may actually believe that there are no worrisome issues with the election machines, but my bet is that his corporate masters told him not to say anything else, under pain of being fired and blacklisted (anyone who believe that under-the-table blacklists don't exist is kidding himself).
The U.S. media organizations are the only ones that I'm aware of that aren't worried about the voting machines being used for this election. That should tell you something.
Which would be a very interesting stance to take indeed, given their founders' mantra of "don't be evil".
Make no mistake: intentionally supporting a system that does more harm than good (and based on the way the patent system is used today, it would be difficult indeed to argue that the patent system on the whole does more good than harm, and relatively easy to argue that it does more harm than good) is evil.
The nature of the system as it is right now forces the participants to play. But I see little reason why the participants can't speak out against the system, all the while participating in it, as long as they use the system in a defensive manner only.
An interest group that has significant control over the government is a de-facto 'authority' regardless of whether or not it happens to fit the strict colloquial or legal definition of the word.
Sorry, but how things play out in the real world is much more relevant than what the definitions of the words are.
Journalists don't let the government tell them what they can and cannot know -- they let their corporate masters tell them that. If they didn't, they'd quickly find themselves without a job. Their corporate masters are now so firmly in control of the government that there's little difference, but what little difference exists is of vital importance.
Their corporate masters are in firm control of the government because you simply cannot (meaning the odds are so low that they're not worth considering anymore) get elected to a national position in the U.S. today without "help" from those same corporate masters, since those corporate masters control what gets published by the mass media and what doesn't.
This is a situation that has no solution short of revolution, and today revolution can't succeed because the government has millions of times more firepower than the citizenry.
Welcome to the 21st century, citizen. Enjoy your stay. Just remember to do what you're told.
What's changed is that over that period of time, large corporations managed to achieve a stranglehold over most mass media outlets, so that now all the mass media of any consequence is owned by large corporations.
Large corporations don't give a crap about the public interest, only corporate interests, which are:
which is achieved by:
Most (if not all) of those things are at odds with the public interest, and so consideration of the public interest has to disappear, according to the corporate worldview, which today is the same as the government's worldview, since the elected members of the government can no longer be elected without the "help" of the large corporations.
Only if the same blocks are being updated by multiple processes, in which case the processes in question should have to go through some sort of arbitration API or, at least, notify the kernel that they don't want transaction support for the operations on those files.
In the general case, if multiple processes are trying to touch the same file at the same time (which, in this case, means within the period of time the transactions in question overlap), then one of them should lose, whether it's via an error or by blocking.
Guess that means there would have to be some additions made to, e.g., fcntl, to make it possible to say whether to block or return an error on a file operation that touches the same data as another in-progress transaction.
Why is that? There's nothing inherently impossible about having the OS remember, via a transaction log, the changes that have taken place to a set of files made by a process, and then either committing them all or rolling back all of them at process exit time (or whenever the process does a commit() or rollback()). The file operations themselves can be identical, so all you really need are those 4 additional operations I mentioned previously.
Such a feature would rock, because it would be possible to make things like installers completely atomic: interrupt the installer process and the whole thing rolls back.
Any interviewer organization that attempted to ask real questions instead of doing the above would quickly find itself unable to gain "access" to said politician anymore, and would thus become "irrelevant" in the political news world, which means less money for the organization. Unless, of course, said organization is one of the big corporate networks, in which case, the organization will treat the politician with kid gloves because the corporation has a vested interest in making sure that candidate doesn't come off looking bad against the other minor candidates that are also running (you'll note that the way these organizations treat third-party candidates and others that aren't in favor with the corporations is much different than how they treat the primary candidates).
Really? Tell me, what exactly is the difference between someone who is greedy and is willing to do anything at all (as long as they either don't get caught or don't lose anything significant when they do) in order to satisfy that greed, and someone who is evil?
I don't think there's any real difference at all.
And since the behavior of many corporations (Diebold, Microsoft, many RIAA members, etc., etc.) is almost exactly described by the above, I think it's perfectly reasonable to call them "evil". Certainly if you were to evaluate their behavior as if they were people, you'd conclude without a doubt that they're psychopaths.
Rather than spend a considerable amount of time and effort in a vain attempt to foil copyright violators, try simply putting out a decent product at a fair price. Those who are honest (who, I think, are most of us) will be willing to pay for something they believe is fairly priced, and those who are dishonest won't be willing to pay for something no matter what -- they'll do everything in their power to illicitly copy it instead.
Honestly, I suspect that the return on the money wasted on fighting copyright infringement by fringe elements is far less than the amount actually spent fighting it.
That's because people who are technologically adept and who have sufficient resources are quite rare. Only someone who can hack the hardware would be able to grab the original digital content from a properly-designed black box.
I suspect that hardware like this will, in time (if not immediately), be used to enforce pay-per-view or something like that for permanent media. From the info page:
Yep, sounds like pay-per-view to me.
It really is only a matter of time before everything that's available falls under the control of something like this...
The difference is this: a computer taking someone's job represents a real productivity improvement -- something is being produced for much less in man hours, not just dollars. The end result is a real increase in efficiency. The person losing their job loses it because the job itself is no longer necessary, because the economy just got more efficient. This is good for everyone because an increase in efficiency means a reduction in the real cost -- in man hours -- of production.
Offshoring does no such thing. Indeed, one could easily argue that offshoring actually increases costs, and thus decreases efficiency, because you not only have to pay for the labor of the person doing the work, but also have to pay for the increased costs of communication. Those costs will drop over time, but they'll always be there.
What offshoring does is transfer wealth. You lose your job, and thus lose the ability to pay for goods and services, just like before. The money saved goes in part to pay for someone else's salary, and the rest goes towards increased profits for the executives and shareholders. But the economy itself doesn't gain a thing as a result of all this, because there is no efficiency gain involved, just a transfer of wealth.
Furthermore, the fact that some of the money is now going overseas while the rest of it goes to people who are the least likely to spend it in the local economy means that the local economy must suffer as a result. The fact that some of the money involved is going overseas means that the local customer base must erode over time.
And all this is because economics really is a zero-sum game after you eliminate population growth and real efficiency gains, because economics is ultimately about the exchange of human labor (if you take any economic exchange, you can always eventually trace it back to an exchange of one person's time for another person's time).
So what would you wind up with if you dilute the waste by the same amount that the original uranium was?
And said plutonium can't itself be used in reactors to generate power?
If you can cause it to fission in a chain reaction (a requirement to build a bomb), you can use it to power a reactor, as long as you have an appropriate neutron moderator.
Sure. But that in itself isn't a problem. It's only a problem when it appears in food and water in concentrations high enough to matter. If the stuff is dilute enough, then that won't be a problem unless there's some sort of natural concentration process happening. Furthermore, it appears that the only toxicity danger of plutonium even worth talking about is that when the plutonium is inhaled. That can be prevented by using the proper method of processing said plutonium.
In any case, none of this is an issue if you use said plutonium as reactor fuel in a properly designed reactor, since at that point the plutonium in question would only present a danger to the people operating the plant or transporting the fuel.
That leaves the other exotic materials generated by the fission process, which obviously have to addressed on an individual basis.
On a per-person basis, economics basically is a zero-sum game, with one exception: productivity improvements through technology.
The study of economics is the study of the exchange of labor. I do for you, you do for someone else, they do for me, etc. Money is the means of representing that labor.
Offshoring does nothing to increase real productivity. The number of man-hours required to perform a given task is the same whether it's done overseas or in the U.S. The only thing that differs is the cost of living, and the only reason that differs is that the standard of living differs. The standard of living is basically the amount of resources an individual has available to him over and above the bare minimum necessary to survive.
It should be trivially obvious that economics is essentially a zero sum game: when you pay someone for their services, the amount of money they gain from the transaction is the same as the amount of money you lose from the transaction. This is true for every single monetary transaction. The money you recieve is the result of labor you expend, and the money you spend is in exchange for the labor of another. And except for the process of printing money, the total supply of money in the economy is fixed. In fact, the economy tends to automatically adjust to an increase in the money supply: goods and services become more "expensive" as a result -- inflation, in other words.
What varies is how equitable the labor exchange is. In other words, how much labor one person is doing in order to pay for the labor of another. If it takes me one hour of my time to pay for a day's worth of someone else's labor, then I'm on the winning side of that exchange and the other person is on the losing side.
Offshoring ultimately increases the amount of inequity of the labor transactions involved, because the employers are paying less in exchange for the same amount of labor. Their goal is to pay as little as possible for the maximum amount of labor possible, and by making use of offshoring they will be able to drive the price of labor to the point where the amount of money they pay to acquire a day's worth of labor from a person is barely enough to pay for a day's worth of subsistence.
A laborer who is paid that little is known as a slave.
The reason offshoring makes this possible is that it is an end-run around labor laws. In the U.S., employers must pay their employees a minimum wage and must operate within certain limits on how much work they can demand from their employees, what conditions their employees can operate in, etc. All of those protections disappear when offshoring happens. The end result is that people in the U.S., who live under such laws, must now compete with people elsewhere who don't. Both sides lose, as the people who don't live under such laws are subject to the abuses that such laws are designed to protect against, and the people who do live under such laws become jobless. The employers will place the economies of entire contries in competition with each other, with the standard of living being the only variable that can be manipulated. When there's strong downward pressure on the standard of living, the standard of living will fall. It must. And all the while, those who run the corporations that are driving the competition will become richer, and all at the expense of the people they employ.
And all that will happen because economics is a zero-sum game in this situation, because offshoring does not increase real productivity. Because real productivity is the amount of work a person can do within a given period of time.
If anything, offshoring will reduce real productivity in the short term, and possibly in the long term as well, because it will be cheaper in the short term to pay people to perform a task directly than to develop the technology to perform the task automatically.
Yep. And the cheapest labor is that of a slave or prisoner who is being given barely enough to eat. Once you know that, you know that's exactly where the global job market is headed, as long as those countries that use slave/prison labor (China?) are allowed to participate in the competition.
That is why offshoring must be limited: the competition doesn't have to follow the same rules you do, and that inherently makes for a tilted playing field. The competition has no incentive to change their ways (they're more "competitive" than you, after all), so you're forced to adopt their ways. That means other countries that wish to compete in the global market must start making use of slave/prison labor, and that puts pressure on the governments to increase the size of their prison labor pool, which puts pressure on them to put more people in prison.
No, offshoring is acceptable only when the target countries have the same labor laws on the books that you have. Otherwise you may as well throw out 100+ years of economic and labor progress (what, you think the middle class just magically appeared? It came about as a direct result of sane labor laws, because the use of automation virtually guarantees that there is more human labor available than work to do).
You mean like how you're supposed to just hope that you don't get certain diseases rather than take the vaccine for them? Or that when you get a disease, you're supposed to tough it out instead of taking meds to attempt to deal with it? Or when you get some sort of internal injury, you're supposed to just live with it instead of getting surgery?
Sorry, but that's bullshit. Death by "natural causes" or "old age" is just another medical condition to be treated, a genetic deficiency to be cured. I see no point in going quietly into the night. Not when any chance for life is better than no chance. I mean, I can't dismiss the possibility of some sort of afterlife, but I'd be a real idiot to base any decisions on such a possibility.
<grumpy old man>
0.25 MIPS CISC? Luxury! Why, back in my day, we had to do the calculations in our heads and push the bits back and forth manually, uphill both ways too! And we liked it!
Kids these days....
</grumpy old man>
So don't run your web server on port 80. Run it on port 443, and set up SSL.
That way worms probably won't bother you nearly as much and you'll get a nice, secure connection to your system from wherever you are. Seriously, even the text-based browsers these days know how to do SSL.
Well, maybe.
The reason you salt data (passwords in particular) is to prevent fast dictionary attacks, which only works when computing the hash is an expensive operation. If the hash is computed only on the plaintext and not (plaintext + salt) then you can precompute the hashes of a bunch of (relatively common) plaintext values. Then, you can quickly find out which plaintext produced the hash that you're trying to crack by looking the hash up in the precomputed hash table.
Salting prevents this by massively increasing the size of the required precomputed hash table. Now instead of storing N precomputed values, you have to store N * S, where S is the number of possible salt values. Password mechanisms which make use of salted values typically store the salt value along with the hash of the salted password. Not only does this potentially make a dictionary attack harder, it also prevents those who know the passwords in question from determining whether or not their password is the same as someone else's simply by examining the hash (the salt is supposed to introduce enough randomness to make this an unlikely occurrance).
Now, for this particular problem (finding a plaintext value which will generate the given hash via an exploitation of a weakness in the hash function itself), adding a salt may complicate things because it may add an additional constraint that has to be accounted for in the attack. I don't know enough to say whether or not that's even an issue in this particular case, however.