I'm too lazy to look it up but the figure I remember seeing is that 25% of the world's hard drive manufacturing capacity has been impacted by the floods so the markup shouldn't be anything like 150%.
Why not? If demand is sufficiently inelastic, prices could go up 1000% if even 5% of the production capacity disappears.
Each lossy compression/decompression cycle loses data. For examples. see YouTube.
If you use an algorithm similar to the original compression algorithm, you do not have to lose much (in the best case, nothing at all). E.g. a part of how JPEG works is reducing the number of colours in little squares. If you decompress/recompress with JPEG at around the same quality level, the algorithm will notice that it doesn't need to eliminate very many colours in each square, because they magically have just the right number of colours already!
Similarly, most movie compressions try to detect if part of the next picture matches the previous, just shifted. After compression and decompression, those areas will stand out clearly to the algorithm and it is likely that similar parameters are chosen for the recompression. You can get unlucky that the second compression picks different I-frames than the first compression did, of course. If this kind of recompression becomes popular, someone will write a tool to guess which frames are I-frames.
What Linux really could use for secure logging is mounting/var/log as an append-only file system. If you can only read from and append to a file, it makes it awfully difficult to tamper with it. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/securing-freebsd.html
Truly append-only makes log rotation difficult, and without it you are not completely secure -- replacing a file is almost as easy for an attacker as in-place editing. Mandatory Access Control makes it possible to ensure that only the log rotation daemon can replace files and everyone else can only append to their log files. Both FreeBSD and Linux provide MAC.
When push comes to shove and you evaluate whether a government is able to pay back what it owes, loan guarantees count just like everything else. A stupid, non-scientific rule of thumb is that a country is in trouble when its loans are up to a years worth of GDP. If the loan guarantees push the government above that psychological boundary, they can get very, very expensive. At lower levels of debt, loan guarantees only push the overall interest rate slightly higher, so they still cost more than absolutely nothing, even if it isn't much.
Sigh, the userland program is just a preprocessor, the kernel still has to parse and validate the memory it gets passed to it.
How difficult exactly is it to parse the Linux kernel font format? It's 5 ints plus an array which the kernel doesn't even need to understand (only boundary check)! Good luck exploiting that. Most ordinary programs/users don't even have ACCESS to the console; even if there was a bug you'd need to log in and run programs on the text console to exploit it. It is somewhat unusual to run word processors on the text console these days, you may have noticed.
Compare that to a Turing-complete hint format where you need to implement a virtual machine as part of the font parser, accessible and used by practically every GUI program.
Pick a technology. Whatever is your favorite. Python? Ruby? C? C++? (MAYBE-P (OR '(Lisp Scheme))) JavaScript, Linux, BSD, Etc.
Guess what? Probably every major company from Lucent to Google to Microsoft to Apple, Oracle, Unisys, IBM, and God only knows who else probably has patent claims that are infringed by your favorite technology.
This is somewhat unlikely for C, as long as you stick to the standard library at least. Patents would have expired by now.
The only right a non-copyright owner has is to request the code for the old, GPL'ed version, as required by the GPL and continue developing it himself.
True, but it is a somewhat useless right. You can request the code, but if they refuse, they are in breach of the GPL. Yay you say and go sue them, but your suit can only be "breach of contract" and you'll have a lot of fun proving that they entered into a contract with you. The copyright owner can sue them for copyright infringement, but the copyright owner is THEM and people rarely sue themselves.
And only if you received a binary directly from them,
This is wrong, they have to offer it to "any third party". Unless they just distributed source and binaries together, in which case they can ignore the whole thing. The "any third party" is interpreted by the FSF as "any third party who managed to get their hands on the written offer of source code."
and even then there's a three-year statute of limitations.
It's hardly a statute of limitations, it's just written into the license.
In the US, you can't copyright code which is the only way to accomplish a particular task. See the Lexmark lawsuit. This makes copyrighting interfaces difficult.
A prosperous Mexico = no more illegal aliens willing to risk their lives to go North = no more resources drained by illegal aliens = financially beneficial to the United States.
I find it highly unlikely that illegal aliens coming from Mexico consume more than they produce in the United States.
Do you think that if libiax was still maintained, IAX2 might be more popular? As things stand now, it's pretty much useful now only for inter-Asterisk trunking.
No, I think the ship has sailed. The only credible threat to SIP is XMPP and we're years away from seeing a serious transition there.
So, moving on, are there any promising candidates in this area?
SIP with ICE is certainly promising. The main remaining challenge is imitating the way Skype uses random well-connected users as proxies for those less fortunate.
IAX2 is a second-class citizen even in Asterisk, and approximately unknown outside Asterisk. Also, IAX2 as used by current Asterisk versions is quite far from the original RFC.
Well, you can always program the robots, right? Well, if the person in question could figure out how to do that chances are they wouldn't be driving taxis right now.
Don't be so sure of that. Plenty of taxi drivers just have the wrong cultural background to be hired in a time when labour is cheap and plentiful. If there was sufficient demand of high level jobs, companies would be less picky about skills unrelated to the profession.
The unemployment we have is not because we have got so good at producing goods and services that no one wants anything more. Pretty much everyone wants more than they have right now. Perhaps the 1% can't consume any more than they do, but the 99% certainly can.
The unemployment we have right now is because our economic system sucks. Capitalism has traditionally been good at making sure that most everyone produced something that other people wanted. Right now there are people want to dine out and chefs who want to make food for others, yet it does not happen. Or, even more bizarrely, public bridges which are failing from lack of maintenance while building workers and engineers are idly watching it happen.
I don't know what the solution is, but it is NOT to prevent people from working. That won't prevent the bridges from falling down. It is also not to make a committee to decide how many shoes should be produced in the next 5 years in which places; that has been tried and it failed. Suggestions certainly welcome.
But there are plenty of viable substitutes. Even the flu vaccine is mercury free around here.
And everyone here talks about whether it's dangerous to the person ingesting it. If there was a risk, it would have been banned for ages, it has been studied for ages. It is not the problematic part.
Production of thiomersal involves the production of mercury (obviously), which in itself is a problem for the environment. When the thiomersal leaves the body, it doesn't magically go away, it goes into the environment.
I really don't see why there should be an exception for vaccines.
That would be an expensive RAID controller to dedicate a whole Xeon to acceleration.
Would it really? At the mid range an extra Xeon is a few hundred USD; obviously a bit more if you have to go for a server with more sockets. At the low end you just pick a 6-core CPU instead of a 4-core. Neither case seems unreasonably expensive to me. With a bit of luck you save an expansion slot.
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Inflation is, by definition, an increase in the money supply.
No, the GP is right.
Inflation due to us running out of natural resources is just as much inflation as if it is due to central banks printing money.
I'm too lazy to look it up but the figure I remember seeing is that 25% of the world's hard drive manufacturing capacity has been impacted by the floods so the markup shouldn't be anything like 150%.
Why not? If demand is sufficiently inelastic, prices could go up 1000% if even 5% of the production capacity disappears.
Each lossy compression/decompression cycle loses data. For examples. see YouTube.
If you use an algorithm similar to the original compression algorithm, you do not have to lose much (in the best case, nothing at all). E.g. a part of how JPEG works is reducing the number of colours in little squares. If you decompress/recompress with JPEG at around the same quality level, the algorithm will notice that it doesn't need to eliminate very many colours in each square, because they magically have just the right number of colours already!
Similarly, most movie compressions try to detect if part of the next picture matches the previous, just shifted. After compression and decompression, those areas will stand out clearly to the algorithm and it is likely that similar parameters are chosen for the recompression. You can get unlucky that the second compression picks different I-frames than the first compression did, of course. If this kind of recompression becomes popular, someone will write a tool to guess which frames are I-frames.
What Linux really could use for secure logging is mounting /var/log as an append-only file system. If you can only read from and append to a file, it makes it awfully difficult to tamper with it. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/securing-freebsd.html
Truly append-only makes log rotation difficult, and without it you are not completely secure -- replacing a file is almost as easy for an attacker as in-place editing. Mandatory Access Control makes it possible to ensure that only the log rotation daemon can replace files and everyone else can only append to their log files. Both FreeBSD and Linux provide MAC.
I've always wondered why Linux hasn't implemented flags like the BSDs. Should be simple enough no? Or am I missing something?
You can achieve this with SELinux.
Even if none of the loans default, it still means that the government is less able to pay for other long-term investments. That is a cost to society.
When push comes to shove and you evaluate whether a government is able to pay back what it owes, loan guarantees count just like everything else. A stupid, non-scientific rule of thumb is that a country is in trouble when its loans are up to a years worth of GDP. If the loan guarantees push the government above that psychological boundary, they can get very, very expensive. At lower levels of debt, loan guarantees only push the overall interest rate slightly higher, so they still cost more than absolutely nothing, even if it isn't much.
Sigh, the userland program is just a preprocessor, the kernel still has to parse and validate the memory it gets passed to it.
How difficult exactly is it to parse the Linux kernel font format? It's 5 ints plus an array which the kernel doesn't even need to understand (only boundary check)! Good luck exploiting that. Most ordinary programs/users don't even have ACCESS to the console; even if there was a bug you'd need to log in and run programs on the text console to exploit it. It is somewhat unusual to run word processors on the text console these days, you may have noticed.
Compare that to a Turing-complete hint format where you need to implement a virtual machine as part of the font parser, accessible and used by practically every GUI program.
Pick a technology. Whatever is your favorite. Python? Ruby? C? C++? (MAYBE-P (OR '(Lisp Scheme))) JavaScript, Linux, BSD, Etc.
Guess what? Probably every major company from Lucent to Google to Microsoft to Apple, Oracle, Unisys, IBM, and God only knows who else probably has patent claims that are infringed by your favorite technology.
This is somewhat unlikely for C, as long as you stick to the standard library at least. Patents would have expired by now.
The only right a non-copyright owner has is to request the code for the old, GPL'ed version, as required by the GPL and continue developing it himself.
True, but it is a somewhat useless right. You can request the code, but if they refuse, they are in breach of the GPL. Yay you say and go sue them, but your suit can only be "breach of contract" and you'll have a lot of fun proving that they entered into a contract with you. The copyright owner can sue them for copyright infringement, but the copyright owner is THEM and people rarely sue themselves.
And only if you received a binary directly from them,
This is wrong, they have to offer it to "any third party". Unless they just distributed source and binaries together, in which case they can ignore the whole thing. The "any third party" is interpreted by the FSF as "any third party who managed to get their hands on the written offer of source code."
and even then there's a three-year statute of limitations.
It's hardly a statute of limitations, it's just written into the license.
In the US, you can't copyright code which is the only way to accomplish a particular task. See the Lexmark lawsuit. This makes copyrighting interfaces difficult.
The final stage is "Why didn't the scientists warn us that it would be this bad?! Sue them!"
A prosperous Mexico = no more illegal aliens willing to risk their lives to go North = no more resources drained by illegal aliens = financially beneficial to the United States.
I find it highly unlikely that illegal aliens coming from Mexico consume more than they produce in the United States.
Do you think that if libiax was still maintained, IAX2 might be more popular? As things stand now, it's pretty much useful now only for inter-Asterisk trunking.
No, I think the ship has sailed. The only credible threat to SIP is XMPP and we're years away from seeing a serious transition there.
So, moving on, are there any promising candidates in this area?
SIP with ICE is certainly promising. The main remaining challenge is imitating the way Skype uses random well-connected users as proxies for those less fortunate.
IAX2 is a second-class citizen even in Asterisk, and approximately unknown outside Asterisk. Also, IAX2 as used by current Asterisk versions is quite far from the original RFC.
Well, you can always program the robots, right? Well, if the person in question could figure out how to do that chances are they wouldn't be driving taxis right now.
Don't be so sure of that. Plenty of taxi drivers just have the wrong cultural background to be hired in a time when labour is cheap and plentiful. If there was sufficient demand of high level jobs, companies would be less picky about skills unrelated to the profession.
The unemployment we have is not because we have got so good at producing goods and services that no one wants anything more. Pretty much everyone wants more than they have right now. Perhaps the 1% can't consume any more than they do, but the 99% certainly can.
The unemployment we have right now is because our economic system sucks. Capitalism has traditionally been good at making sure that most everyone produced something that other people wanted. Right now there are people want to dine out and chefs who want to make food for others, yet it does not happen. Or, even more bizarrely, public bridges which are failing from lack of maintenance while building workers and engineers are idly watching it happen.
I don't know what the solution is, but it is NOT to prevent people from working. That won't prevent the bridges from falling down. It is also not to make a committee to decide how many shoes should be produced in the next 5 years in which places; that has been tried and it failed. Suggestions certainly welcome.
Maybe I'm a bad, horrible, terrible person, but I hope that you'll get it first.
Hopefully amalgam will be phased out everywhere eventually.
But there are plenty of viable substitutes. Even the flu vaccine is mercury free around here.
And everyone here talks about whether it's dangerous to the person ingesting it. If there was a risk, it would have been banned for ages, it has been studied for ages. It is not the problematic part.
Production of thiomersal involves the production of mercury (obviously), which in itself is a problem for the environment. When the thiomersal leaves the body, it doesn't magically go away, it goes into the environment.
I really don't see why there should be an exception for vaccines.
That would be an expensive RAID controller to dedicate a whole Xeon to acceleration.
Would it really? At the mid range an extra Xeon is a few hundred USD; obviously a bit more if you have to go for a server with more sockets. At the low end you just pick a 6-core CPU instead of a 4-core. Neither case seems unreasonably expensive to me. With a bit of luck you save an expansion slot.
Quantum had their share of troubles. The Bigfoot drives would once in a while need a good kick to the side to get going again.
The best RAID accelerators are sold by Intel and AMD under the brand names "Xeon" and "Opteron"...