And last time I checked, Best Buy, Comcast, and those laptop manufacturers are seperate companies from Microsoft. They could just as easily sell all their computers without Windows.
No, to get OEM pricing from Microsoft the laptop manufacturers generally have to agree to keep other operating systems to separate model numbers. That is, they can't offer the same model number with both Windows and Linux, they have to make two identical laptops except for the OS. This may seem like a small problem to you, but it's actually quite a hassle for the laptop companies and the shopping chains. Since it's such a hassle, the laptop manufacturers offer very few laptops that way.
2GB or so of DRAM as a buffer and as a/temp filesystem for things like internet cache, swap and other stuff that can (and maybe should) be cleared/erased on a reboot
Why do you want to place the DRAM behind a slow SATA bus? Even if you switch to a better bus, nothing beats having a dedicated channel to the memory.
Bulk trasfer speed does not have to be slow. Its not like your hard drive in your PC now reads from one head at a time.
Err yes, in fact, that's exactly what it does.
It uses multiple heads to achieve higher rates by reading/writing all the platters at one time.
No. It was attempted, I believe by Seagate in the first Barracuda drives, but it was quickly abandoned. The only way it can work at modern capacities is if you added a drive motor and independent electronics per head. Doable, but it's cheaper to just buy two drives and do RAID-1.
Your argument sounds kind of circular - don't use gold; it's not really worth anything. Use something valuable,
True, I'm arguing two things at once. First: If you WANT backing, gold is useless. It's a fiat currency in itself. So don't use gold. Use something with actual value.
but don't actually set it aside to back the dollar.
Second: You don't actually WANT backing. Proper backing means taking a lot of valuable stuff and hiding it away.
The ideal is to use something that is not 'useful', but is in limited quantity, so it means something that it backs the dollar. Gold sounds like a pretty good candidate to me.
Dollars are not useful and are available in limited quantities. And you don't actually have to hide anything away. Lots of useless work is done mining gold; in fact gold mining kills people.
Yeah, cause printing money without anything backing up makes a lot more sense.
There never was any backing. The value of gold is cultural, just like the value of currency. The amount of gold used for actual goods such as jewelry or electronics is much smaller than the total amount mined. If you want backing, at least use something of value. (But it would be completely stupid to store away enough stuff of value to back the money supply. That would be a tremendous waste of valuable goods. At least for now it's only the relatively abundant and not all that useful gold we use for that.)
It's quite possible that the slightly higher CO2 levels will promote plant life and that essentially no matter how much CO2 we dump into the atmosphere, the plant life will keep it at a new "normal" level of say high-300, low-400 ppm
It's also possible that the sun will notice that humans are considering the climate too hot and will therefore regulate its emissions. Not particularly likely, just like the above. If biomass is going to soak up the excess CO2, it will have to grow dramatically. The quantities involved are simply staggering. So far we haven't seen signs of increasing biomass.
SELinux provides ACLs, as does AppArmor, which suze uses. It's kind of hard to adopt a permissions system that works differently between distros and not at all on some.
Neither SELinux nor AppArmor provides ACLs. ACLs are discretionary access controls, users can change the permissions. SELinux and AppArmor provide mandatory access control.
ACLs have been in the Linux file systems for ages, and they work exactly the same across distributions. They just aren't used.
A modern phone with the display, bluetooth, wifi etc. turned off has a battery life on the good side of a week. Very few users keep their phones off for that long.
Since you are going to act as if you are off, there is no communication about where you and hence you get no calls.
You just turn off the display and stop reacting to the keyboard (except the power button). There is still communication with the cell towers, the app is just making the user believe the phone is off.
The problem is that there's a logical mismatch here. One of OnStar's advertised features is that police can use OnStar to track a stolen car. If a stolen car can be tracked, there can't be a technical barrier to tracking a car that isn't stolen.
If OnStar uses a cell phone network, it automatically identifies its approximate position all the time. That's how cell phones work, they constantly maintain registration with the nearest towers. Cell phones are the privacy worry here, not OnStar (except it's easier to turn cell phones off. But then it's also easy to make a smart phone app which pretends the phone is off.)
RBAC has been in Linux for a long time, in the form of SELinux. The new thing is that you can store the privileges in the file system. The advantage is that you don't need to modify your formerly set-uid applications, so it is easier on the system administrator. The disadvantage is that you don't need to modify your applications, so any security vulnerabilities caused by running with a lower privilege (yes, that is possible) might not be discovered by the good guys first.
Without copyright, the code (or whatever else) would drop directly into public domain, and the most important part of the GPL is lost.
That isn't the most important part of GPL. There are lots of competent reverse engineers out there. Copyright going away wouldn't do significant harm to the free software community, and it would do a whole lot of good.
Places like SpyTorrent are a reason why they've gone draconian. I don't believe it at all justifies their actions. But let's not make them out to be a victim here. What they were doing is wrong and they're a part of the blame for this whole mess.
The more piracy, the cheaper prices and fewer restrictions on legal content. Look at the prices of console games vs. PC games for one example. If you give the copyright holders an inch, they'll take a mile.
Feel free to download and run FreeNet, too, which (if it ever gets some momentum) will make it exponentially less likely that anybody will be caught.
FreeNet is the sort of project that stops real solutions from being developed. It's almost entirely useless, but it's so close to being useful. And it's been that close for what, 3 or 4 years, with no progress?
If FreeNet hadn't existed, someone might have stepped in to fill the void. As it is, people try FreeNet for a while, then turn it off. The only thing it does a decent job at is distributing child pornography. (Relatively small picture files to people who have few other ways to get it, so they're willing to wait. Heck, some of them are willing to molest children to get it. It certainly isn't determination they're short of.)
I'd say: send us your serviced headcount. Otherwise, we monitor DNS and see if they're being used.
Who is "we"? If you mean the registries, they only work because most of the ISP's generally agree with their policies. The ISP's are well-behaved in general, and the ones that aren't get their routes filtered by those who are. If the registries suddenly decided to take away addresses, the ISP's would simply ignore them. Note that address stealing is a problem already.
The Internet address assignments work because almost everyone believes they work, and because almost everyone makes more money by not upsetting the status quo. If you give someone large incentives to mess with the system (e.g. by taking away a lot of their address space), this delicate balance will collapse.
It bad idea as IPv6 kills NAT and ISP like COMCRAP will love to make you pay per system that you have on your network.
If they try that stunt it's trivially easy to bring in NAT for IPv6. At the same time it is also relatively easy to detect NAT's on IPv4, but none of the providers even try. (Ok, that turns into an arms race, but the entity with the most resources tend to win those.)
For those two reasons I doubt that ISP's will try that business model.
Autoconfigure only works when the upstream router announces a/64 netmask. That means that 64 bits are used just to configure a machine, what a waste of address space.
Think of it a different way. IPv6 is 64 bits, plus 8 magic bytes you just carry around. 64 bits is a lot of addresses, so you won't run out.
Yes I wish they had done it differently, preferably by simply doing away with networks and making everything point-to-point. That's how networks are wired anyway, and it's stupid to do LAN emulation on top of point-to-point links.
Also Cisco gear old enough to not support IPv6 is so old you can't even buy support for it anymore, businesses should not be running on that kind of gear anyway.
IPv6 doesn't come with the base image for a lot of Cisco gear.
I dunno about you or others, but certainly we had to learn our multiplication tables up to 12x12 in school.
We didn't. However, in base n, multiplying by n+1 is pretty easy, so 11 doesn't really count. 10 doesn't either, for obvious reasons. If you were working in base 12, you wouldn't have that advantage.
If I were to choose, I would rather change our numeric system to use base 12 (divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6), or 60 (divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30) instead of 10 (divisible by 2 and 5).
Multiplication gets quite hard in base 60. We rely on a lookup-table to handle each digit, but memorizing a 3600-entry table isn't much fun. There are other ways to do multiplication, but none I would want to force on pupils in elementary school.
Even 12 turns a 100-entry table into a 144-entry one. Not nice.
Considering the alternative is that we take the work from them by force, I'd consider your world view far, far, far more sad.
Ah the good old "taking by force". I could bring out the good old responses about how you can take something from someone even though they still have it. But it's more fun watching someone who believes that they subscribe to rationality and "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins" trying desperately to pretend their nose was struck, even though my fist is half the world away in my own house.
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And last time I checked, Best Buy, Comcast, and those laptop manufacturers are seperate companies from Microsoft. They could just as easily sell all their computers without Windows.
No, to get OEM pricing from Microsoft the laptop manufacturers generally have to agree to keep other operating systems to separate model numbers. That is, they can't offer the same model number with both Windows and Linux, they have to make two identical laptops except for the OS. This may seem like a small problem to you, but it's actually quite a hassle for the laptop companies and the shopping chains. Since it's such a hassle, the laptop manufacturers offer very few laptops that way.
2GB or so of DRAM as a buffer and as a /temp filesystem for things like internet cache, swap and other stuff that can (and maybe should) be cleared/erased on a reboot
Why do you want to place the DRAM behind a slow SATA bus? Even if you switch to a better bus, nothing beats having a dedicated channel to the memory.
Bulk trasfer speed does not have to be slow. Its not like your hard drive in your PC now reads from one head at a time.
Err yes, in fact, that's exactly what it does.
It uses multiple heads to achieve higher rates by reading/writing all the platters at one time.
No. It was attempted, I believe by Seagate in the first Barracuda drives, but it was quickly abandoned. The only way it can work at modern capacities is if you added a drive motor and independent electronics per head. Doable, but it's cheaper to just buy two drives and do RAID-1.
Your points about flash are correct though.
Your argument sounds kind of circular - don't use gold; it's not really worth anything. Use something valuable,
True, I'm arguing two things at once. First: If you WANT backing, gold is useless. It's a fiat currency in itself. So don't use gold. Use something with actual value.
but don't actually set it aside to back the dollar.
Second: You don't actually WANT backing. Proper backing means taking a lot of valuable stuff and hiding it away.
The ideal is to use something that is not 'useful', but is in limited quantity, so it means something that it backs the dollar. Gold sounds like a pretty good candidate to me.
Dollars are not useful and are available in limited quantities. And you don't actually have to hide anything away. Lots of useless work is done mining gold; in fact gold mining kills people.
Yeah, cause printing money without anything backing up makes a lot more sense.
There never was any backing. The value of gold is cultural, just like the value of currency. The amount of gold used for actual goods such as jewelry or electronics is much smaller than the total amount mined. If you want backing, at least use something of value. (But it would be completely stupid to store away enough stuff of value to back the money supply. That would be a tremendous waste of valuable goods. At least for now it's only the relatively abundant and not all that useful gold we use for that.)
It's quite possible that the slightly higher CO2 levels will promote plant life and that essentially no matter how much CO2 we dump into the atmosphere, the plant life will keep it at a new "normal" level of say high-300, low-400 ppm
It's also possible that the sun will notice that humans are considering the climate too hot and will therefore regulate its emissions. Not particularly likely, just like the above. If biomass is going to soak up the excess CO2, it will have to grow dramatically. The quantities involved are simply staggering. So far we haven't seen signs of increasing biomass.
SELinux provides ACLs, as does AppArmor, which suze uses. It's kind of hard to adopt a permissions system that works differently between distros and not at all on some.
Neither SELinux nor AppArmor provides ACLs. ACLs are discretionary access controls, users can change the permissions. SELinux and AppArmor provide mandatory access control.
ACLs have been in the Linux file systems for ages, and they work exactly the same across distributions. They just aren't used.
A modern phone with the display, bluetooth, wifi etc. turned off has a battery life on the good side of a week. Very few users keep their phones off for that long.
Since you are going to act as if you are off, there is no communication about where you and hence you get no calls.
You just turn off the display and stop reacting to the keyboard (except the power button). There is still communication with the cell towers, the app is just making the user believe the phone is off.
Either you have a pretty stupid phone app
Not stupid, malicious.
The problem is that there's a logical mismatch here. One of OnStar's advertised features is that police can use OnStar to track a stolen car. If a stolen car can be tracked, there can't be a technical barrier to tracking a car that isn't stolen.
If OnStar uses a cell phone network, it automatically identifies its approximate position all the time. That's how cell phones work, they constantly maintain registration with the nearest towers. Cell phones are the privacy worry here, not OnStar (except it's easier to turn cell phones off. But then it's also easy to make a smart phone app which pretends the phone is off.)
RBAC has been in Linux for a long time, in the form of SELinux. The new thing is that you can store the privileges in the file system. The advantage is that you don't need to modify your formerly set-uid applications, so it is easier on the system administrator. The disadvantage is that you don't need to modify your applications, so any security vulnerabilities caused by running with a lower privilege (yes, that is possible) might not be discovered by the good guys first.
They're not trying to make a browser for a freakin' mobile phone here ok?
Minimo and Maemo browser. Here is an article about Mozilla and mobile.
Without copyright, the code (or whatever else) would drop directly into public domain, and the most important part of the GPL is lost.
That isn't the most important part of GPL. There are lots of competent reverse engineers out there. Copyright going away wouldn't do significant harm to the free software community, and it would do a whole lot of good.
Places like SpyTorrent are a reason why they've gone draconian. I don't believe it at all justifies their actions. But let's not make them out to be a victim here. What they were doing is wrong and they're a part of the blame for this whole mess.
The more piracy, the cheaper prices and fewer restrictions on legal content. Look at the prices of console games vs. PC games for one example. If you give the copyright holders an inch, they'll take a mile.
Feel free to download and run FreeNet, too, which (if it ever gets some momentum) will make it exponentially less likely that anybody will be caught.
FreeNet is the sort of project that stops real solutions from being developed. It's almost entirely useless, but it's so close to being useful. And it's been that close for what, 3 or 4 years, with no progress?
If FreeNet hadn't existed, someone might have stepped in to fill the void. As it is, people try FreeNet for a while, then turn it off. The only thing it does a decent job at is distributing child pornography. (Relatively small picture files to people who have few other ways to get it, so they're willing to wait. Heck, some of them are willing to molest children to get it. It certainly isn't determination they're short of.)
I'd say: send us your serviced headcount. Otherwise, we monitor DNS and see if they're being used.
Who is "we"? If you mean the registries, they only work because most of the ISP's generally agree with their policies. The ISP's are well-behaved in general, and the ones that aren't get their routes filtered by those who are. If the registries suddenly decided to take away addresses, the ISP's would simply ignore them. Note that address stealing is a problem already.
The Internet address assignments work because almost everyone believes they work, and because almost everyone makes more money by not upsetting the status quo. If you give someone large incentives to mess with the system (e.g. by taking away a lot of their address space), this delicate balance will collapse.
It bad idea as IPv6 kills NAT and ISP like COMCRAP will love to make you pay per system that you have on your network.
If they try that stunt it's trivially easy to bring in NAT for IPv6. At the same time it is also relatively easy to detect NAT's on IPv4, but none of the providers even try. (Ok, that turns into an arms race, but the entity with the most resources tend to win those.)
For those two reasons I doubt that ISP's will try that business model.
Autoconfigure only works when the upstream router announces a /64 netmask. That means that 64 bits are used just to configure a machine, what a waste of address space.
Think of it a different way. IPv6 is 64 bits, plus 8 magic bytes you just carry around. 64 bits is a lot of addresses, so you won't run out.
Yes I wish they had done it differently, preferably by simply doing away with networks and making everything point-to-point. That's how networks are wired anyway, and it's stupid to do LAN emulation on top of point-to-point links.
Also Cisco gear old enough to not support IPv6 is so old you can't even buy support for it anymore, businesses should not be running on that kind of gear anyway.
IPv6 doesn't come with the base image for a lot of Cisco gear.
Apparently you people believe that the student is there for the benefit of the teacher.
I dunno about you or others, but certainly we had to learn our multiplication tables up to 12x12 in school.
We didn't. However, in base n, multiplying by n+1 is pretty easy, so 11 doesn't really count. 10 doesn't either, for obvious reasons. If you were working in base 12, you wouldn't have that advantage.
If I were to choose, I would rather change our numeric system to use base 12 (divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6), or 60 (divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30) instead of 10 (divisible by 2 and 5).
Multiplication gets quite hard in base 60. We rely on a lookup-table to handle each digit, but memorizing a 3600-entry table isn't much fun. There are other ways to do multiplication, but none I would want to force on pupils in elementary school.
Even 12 turns a 100-entry table into a 144-entry one. Not nice.
Doing something someone doesn't want IS FORCE. Whether or not you physically harm them is 100% irrelevant.
Please refrain from standing on one leg in the future. I don't want you to.
Considering the alternative is that we take the work from them by force, I'd consider your world view far, far, far more sad.
Ah the good old "taking by force". I could bring out the good old responses about how you can take something from someone even though they still have it. But it's more fun watching someone who believes that they subscribe to rationality and "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins" trying desperately to pretend their nose was struck, even though my fist is half the world away in my own house.
Quite true, however, if someone wants to benefit from the work you do, they owe you compensation for it
That is a very sad world view.