There is something wrong when wealth can be concentrated into so few people, that the rest of the USA is left with less.
Interesting point, but concentration of wealth does not necessarily imply that the rest of us have less wealth than we would have had otherwise (economics is not a zero sum game). It's likely to be true to some extent, but proving it is hard, especially since many factors are involved (tax rates, technology, the economy, etc..).
(note: I'm really only posting here because I accidentally modded parent "funny" when I meant to mod it "interesting", and by posting I revoke my moderation)
Here's the actual license, for those too lazy to follow the parent's link. It's very short, and allows you to do pretty much whatever you like with it:
This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.
Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely, subject to the following restrictions:
1.
The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required.
2.
Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.
3.
This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.
Agreement on a quantity (taxes, spending, etc.) is when exactly half think the quantity is to high, and the other half thinks it is too low. Some people see our two party winner take all system as dysfunctional, when it is really mature democracy near equilibrium.
That's an interesting point. However,
a) Many issues are not simply a matter of agreeing on a quantity, and there are often more options available than "more of x" or "less of x" (where x usually equals "money for some program" or "taxes").
b) Moral issues usually have discrete values, and compromise is not always a reasonable option.
c) Politics is not one dimensional. Mapping everyone's ideas onto a line is a convenient way to discard someone's ideas without understanding them. It's easy to say "I don't have to understand that guy's arguments, he's a [right wing extremist / commie / wishy-washy centrist]."
The problem isn't so much that salesmen lie, the problem is that a consumer doesn't have any way to verify the salesman's claims, regardless of whether he's lying or not. If the customer can't independantly verify that the thing he's buying isn't junk, he's going to assume that it is. Consequently, there's a strong disincentive to sell high quality products when the consumer is going to assume he's buying junk, and won't extra for a quality product. If a company can't make money selling a quality product, all companies will eventually end up selling junk.
Slashdot does do a remarkably good job of filtering lame content (not by deleting it, but by displaying it less prominently, which is the right approach, in my opinion). The reputation system is a bit of a hack, but it works well. If anyone's interested in what the state of the art is, I came across this www paper (www the conference, not www the thing that uses port 80) from some folks at IBM research describing the reputation system used by epinions.com. It gets its input from a mechanism similar to friend and foe lists, and propogates trust and distrust similar to the pagerank algorithm of google.
Looks like the 4801 has usb, too (though only usb 1.1, which at 12 mbps is a little slow as a file server). A large drive with a usb enclosure is probably a lot cheaper than an equivalent laptop drive, though it would be slower and draw more power.
Another option might be to use one of those ethernet drive enclosures. If they don't already export smb and/or nfs (I've just seen them at Fry's, I don't really know what they do or how they work, or if multiple computers can access them concurrently) and they work with linux/bsd, you could mount one from the soekris box and re-export the file system through samba and nfs.
For Iraq it's now sitting at 43 Bush to 26 Kerry. Many of the asian countries show a lead for Bush, but this may be because most asians have never heard of Kerry, or Nader, or Badnarik. A large proportion of the asian votes are registered from India, which is leaning strongly towards Kerry.
This would be far more informative if they used approval voting: for each candidate, do you approve or disapprove? Maybe there should be a no opinion option as well. It would be nice to see each candidate's approval rating by region independent of the other candidates who might be running.
I also wonder how many respondents in Iraq are really American military personnel or contractors (or ballot stuffers who don't really live in Iraq). It is possible that Bush is popular with a few of the less vocal non-AK47-weilding demographic of Iraq.
I could be wrong, there could be some people here who value removing the Patriot Act over their own lives and the lives of their family and friends.
Your post is interesting and informative, and I gree that total isolationism is not the solution to national security, but I disagree with your last point (if I understand it correctly). I don't think throwing away some of our rights in the name of safety is a good idea (nor is it likely to work). The patriot act has many points, some of which are reasonable and perhaps necessary to combat terrorism. However, it also includes some provisions which are very disturbing (From wikipedia):
This law provides for indefinite imprisonment without trial of non-U.S. citizens whom the Attorney General has determined to be a threat to national security. The government is not required to provide detainees with counsel, nor is it required to make any announcement or statement regarding the arrest.
I go to a grad school with a lot of non-US citizens. I don't like the idea that any of them could be hauled off to an undisclosed location just because the AG says so.
Sec. 805(a)(2): Expands the definition of 'material support' to foreign terrorist organizations to include 'expert advice and assistance'. According to an article in Reason magazine, this section has been cited by Assistant US Attorney Christopher Morvillo and by Assistant US Attorney Robin Baker as grounds for prosecuting a US lawyer who defends a terror suspect. Critics suggest that this amounts to state intimidation of defence counsel, likely to undermine the constitutionally protected due process right to counsel.
Section 215 is one of the surprising lightning rods of the Patriot Act, engendering more protest, lawsuits, and congressional amendments than any other. In part this is because this section authorizes the government to march into a library and demand a list of everyone who's ever checked out a copy of My Secret Garden but also because those librarians are tough.
What it does: Section 215 modifies the rules on records searches. Post-Patriot Act, third-party holders of your financial, library, travel, video rental, phone, medical, church, synagogue, and mosque records can be searched without your knowledge or consent, providing the government says it's trying to protect against terrorism.
The law before and how it changed: Previously the government needed at least a warrant and probable cause to access private records. The Fourth Amendment, Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, and case law provided that if the state wished to search you, it needed to show probable cause that a crime had been committed and to obtain a warrant from a neutral judge. Under FISA--the 1978 act authorizing warrantless surveillance so long as the primary purpose was to obtain foreign intelligence information--that was somewhat eroded, but there remained judicial oversight. And under FISA, records could be sought only "for purposes of conducting foreign intelligence" and the target "linked to foreign espionage" and an "agent of a foreign power." Now the FBI needs only to certify to a FISA judge--(no need for evidence or probable cause) that the search protects against terrorism. The judge has no authority to reject this application. DOJ calls this "seeking a court order," but it's much closer to a rubber stamp. Also, now the target of a search needn't be a terror suspect herself, so long as the government's purpose is "an authorized investigation... to protect against international terrorism."
The military can go anywhere, setup within days.
We don't need to pay for bases.
In some cases, days may be too long. Aircraft carriers give us some of the same capabilities as bases, but you can't win a war (or deter a well equiped aggressor nation) with aircraft carriers. There's too many targets. There's really no substitute for ground troops, and they need staging areas, supply lines, airstrips and ports to bring in equipment, etc.. Expecting them to be able to magically materialize at the right moment in a stratigically advantageous position all at once is unrealistic.
If you don't have overseas bases, your military presence doesn't ammount to much. That's a big strategic advantage to give up, and it may have a destabilizing effect on some parts of the world.
I agree that we often spend our foreign aid money on stupid things (such as supporting local thugs for our own gain), but some foreign aid is beneficial. We should be preventing humanitarian crises, helping poor countries develop basic infrastructure, sponsoring good NGOs, etc..
If Badnarik thinks we should modify our foreign aid policy to be more reasonable, I don't have a problem with that. If he thinks we should never, as a matter of policy, ever intevene in another country's affairs even in the cases when they clearly need our help (such as disaster relief), and it wouldn't cost us much to do so, I do have a problem with that. I'm not sure what Badnarik's stance is, he seems to have left that particular question blank on the national political awareness test.
How would you feel if there was a Chinese or Russian military base in your neighborhood?
That depends who my neighbors are. My current nearest neighboring country is Canada. If it was North Korea, I might answer the question differently. It also would depend on who the occupying country was, and whether my own country was free to kick them out at any time. It's a shame that our military has damaged their reputation in many places around the world. On the other hand, there may be many wars which never happened because we were there as a deterent (unfortunately, history only tells us what happened, not what could have happened).
Attend a speech from Michael Badnarik and support him
I am considering voting for him, since I'm not impressed with Kerry (Who seems to promise alot without delving into details, and whom I disagree with on many issues) or Bush (Whom I generally agree with on many issues, but the execution of his ideas leaves a lot to be desired, and he still thinks the patriot act is a good idea).
I do have some reservations about Badnarik, though. He seems to have an unrealistic view of the free market as the solution to everything. Capitalism is a very good thing, but if you don't understand the situations in which it fails, you're heading for disaster. For instance:
information asymmetry leads to all sorts of problems. That's why we need things like government mandated ingredient lists in the food we buy. The market functions much better when people know what they're buying.
Monopolies can potentially be just as destructive as government-run industries (or even more so, since they lack accountability). Choosing between the local phone monopoly and the local cable monopoly for internet access is hardly a "free market".
His ideas on free trade seem a little weird:
"We need to get the government out of regulating trade, so that American workers can do what they do best and that is to create wealth."
Maybe we shouldn't regulate trade as much as we do, but dropping all our trade rules would encourage other countries to take advantage of our relaxed policies, and tax trade heavily on their end instead of ours. Free trade requires mutual cooperation between countries, just like peace.
Badnarik opposes government regulation of the energy industry, instead arguing that the free market is more effective in controlling prices and maintaining stability. "All you need to know about economics is the law of supply and demand. When the supply of something goes down, the price of it will go up. And as the price of gasoline goes up, the consumerist at the pump is going to provide the incentive for finding alternative sources."
In terms of electricity, this is nonsense. If one entity controls the power lines coming into my house, and can charge whatever it likes, my power bills would certainly increase. PUDs exist for a reason. Having multiple electricity providers is expensive and unnecessary, but a single provider with no rules restricting its behavior would overcharge its customers and provide terrible service. Regulation of industry is sometimes a necessary evil.
As president, Badnarik would avoid "entangling alliances" and would initiate "a rapid recall of our troops from around the world. Other countries will be less likely to attack us when we are trading goods that are necessary for their survival." He supports the reduction and eventual elimination of government-funded foreign aid programs
Does he think that a terrorist group planning an attack on the United States might stop and say "Hey, maybe we should leave the US alone, because I like Pepsi and Macdonalds"? That seems a little naive. Has any country ever not attacked a neighbor because they're a convenient source of some useful product? (Not a rhetorical question, I'm actually curious.) Certainly the reverse happens quite alot - countries are attacked because the aggressor wants to take their resources. And what's wrong with foreign aid? Can't we do something nice for people once in awhile? We certainly could use a better reputation as a country.
The quotes come from a wikipedia article. I agree with Badnarik on most other issues, but he still seems to take an extreme stance sometimes that appears to be the product of an overly simplistic view of the way the world works (something almost everyone is guilty of at times). Maybe I'm taking his statements out of context. If so, someone please correct me.
Part of the challenge of the IFPC contest was that the ant language is significantly less powerful than what people are accustomed to coding in. In order to write anything that isn't horribly painful, you have to write your own compiler.
The only per-ant state that is remembered is the state number (ants are limited to 10000 states). For instance, in order to remember which way your ant is pointing you can't just remember it in some variable, you have to make six copies of your program and jump between copies any time you turn right or left.
What this means for the game is that when an ant reaches food, it can never remember how to get back without actually marking some sort of trail (which might lead nowhere). Coordinating complex behavior between multiple ants is difficult, though not impossible.
Do you support approval voting or some other non-plurality voting system as a way to allow voters to support less popular candidates without "throwing their vote away"?
If a forward isn't set up for a certain type of traffic, all that means is that NAT won't translate that packet. It doesn't mean it gets dropped. It will just get passed along untranslated unless firewall rules block it.
That's a bug, not a feature. If a NAT receives an IP packet from outside that's addressed to it's internal, unroutable network it should drop it on the floor (if it's not already filtered by your ISP). Perhaps not all NATs work that way, but it's not hard to imagine one that works correctly. If such a device no longer fits your definition of NAT, you should think about expanding your definition.
Wrong. You can send all the packets you want to a machine behind a NAT router if the routing on the outside is set up right.
Maybe if you set up port forwarding, or you're using a broken NAT that uses a static table rather than full IP masquerade. Nothing behind the NAT has a globally routable IP address, so there's no way to send anything to it unless the NAT is configured to forward packets sent on a particular port, which it shouldn't do unless port forwarding is configured on that port or an internal machine has transmitted a packet to the outside world and the NAT remembered it's source port and internal IP so it can rewrite incoming reply packets.
As has been said many many times before, NAT has abosolutely nothing to do with security.
If it's been said that many times, would it be that hard to cite a reference?
You can't send a packet to a box behind a NAT unless it's part of a connection initiated by the machine behind the NAT. This makes it immune to all sorts of potential attacks from outside machines. NATs don't fix browser bugs or email worms, but they do prevent quite a few remote exploits.
The current network providers have little incentive to move to IPv6 because they make money through the artificial scarcity of IP addresses. They like the current situation because they have an advantage - new ISPs have trouble entering the market due to the lack of large contiguous IP blocks. When we start falling behind the rest of the world (since countries without enough IPs to go around have no reason to stick with IPv4), maybe they'll start switching to IPv6.
NAT is a solution, and it may be usefull in IPv6 networks as well as IPv4 for security reasons, but it shouldn't be forced on people (it interferes with the end-to-end philosophy of the internet). Also, not all countries have enough IPs for a one NAT per household policy.
It's also a good idea to look you ip up on dshield. They aggregate firewall logs from many sources. If your IP is causing someone trouble, it is likely to show up there. Another similar service is mynetwatchman.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting point, but concentration of wealth does not necessarily imply that the rest of us have less wealth than we would have had otherwise (economics is not a zero sum game). It's likely to be true to some extent, but proving it is hard, especially since many factors are involved (tax rates, technology, the economy, etc..).
(note: I'm really only posting here because I accidentally modded parent "funny" when I meant to mod it "interesting", and by posting I revoke my moderation)
-jim
Here's the actual license, for those too lazy to follow the parent's link. It's very short, and allows you to do pretty much whatever you like with it:
-jim
That's an interesting point. However,
-jim
...and that's why we need approval voting, or some similar system. (Yeah, I know I'm being redundant)
-jim
Information Asymmetry
The problem isn't so much that salesmen lie, the problem is that a consumer doesn't have any way to verify the salesman's claims, regardless of whether he's lying or not. If the customer can't independantly verify that the thing he's buying isn't junk, he's going to assume that it is. Consequently, there's a strong disincentive to sell high quality products when the consumer is going to assume he's buying junk, and won't extra for a quality product. If a company can't make money selling a quality product, all companies will eventually end up selling junk.
-jim
Slashdot does do a remarkably good job of filtering lame content (not by deleting it, but by displaying it less prominently, which is the right approach, in my opinion). The reputation system is a bit of a hack, but it works well. If anyone's interested in what the state of the art is, I came across this www paper (www the conference, not www the thing that uses port 80) from some folks at IBM research describing the reputation system used by epinions.com. It gets its input from a mechanism similar to friend and foe lists, and propogates trust and distrust similar to the pagerank algorithm of google.
-jim
Looks like the 4801 has usb, too (though only usb 1.1, which at 12 mbps is a little slow as a file server). A large drive with a usb enclosure is probably a lot cheaper than an equivalent laptop drive, though it would be slower and draw more power.
Another option might be to use one of those ethernet drive enclosures. If they don't already export smb and/or nfs (I've just seen them at Fry's, I don't really know what they do or how they work, or if multiple computers can access them concurrently) and they work with linux/bsd, you could mount one from the soekris box and re-export the file system through samba and nfs.
-jim
This would be far more informative if they used approval voting: for each candidate, do you approve or disapprove? Maybe there should be a no opinion option as well. It would be nice to see each candidate's approval rating by region independent of the other candidates who might be running.
I also wonder how many respondents in Iraq are really American military personnel or contractors (or ballot stuffers who don't really live in Iraq). It is possible that Bush is popular with a few of the less vocal non-AK47-weilding demographic of Iraq.
Here are the results of an actual (controversial) poll of iraqis. One interesting result:
-jim
Some parts sunset, but not all of them.
-jim
Your post is interesting and informative, and I gree that total isolationism is not the solution to national security, but I disagree with your last point (if I understand it correctly). I don't think throwing away some of our rights in the name of safety is a good idea (nor is it likely to work). The patriot act has many points, some of which are reasonable and perhaps necessary to combat terrorism. However, it also includes some provisions which are very disturbing (From wikipedia):
I go to a grad school with a lot of non-US citizens. I don't like the idea that any of them could be hauled off to an undisclosed location just because the AG says so.
This is also scary. See also this slate article:
-jim
In some cases, days may be too long. Aircraft carriers give us some of the same capabilities as bases, but you can't win a war (or deter a well equiped aggressor nation) with aircraft carriers. There's too many targets. There's really no substitute for ground troops, and they need staging areas, supply lines, airstrips and ports to bring in equipment, etc.. Expecting them to be able to magically materialize at the right moment in a stratigically advantageous position all at once is unrealistic.
If you don't have overseas bases, your military presence doesn't ammount to much. That's a big strategic advantage to give up, and it may have a destabilizing effect on some parts of the world.
-jim
I agree that we often spend our foreign aid money on stupid things (such as supporting local thugs for our own gain), but some foreign aid is beneficial. We should be preventing humanitarian crises, helping poor countries develop basic infrastructure, sponsoring good NGOs, etc..
If Badnarik thinks we should modify our foreign aid policy to be more reasonable, I don't have a problem with that. If he thinks we should never, as a matter of policy, ever intevene in another country's affairs even in the cases when they clearly need our help (such as disaster relief), and it wouldn't cost us much to do so, I do have a problem with that. I'm not sure what Badnarik's stance is, he seems to have left that particular question blank on the national political awareness test.
That depends who my neighbors are. My current nearest neighboring country is Canada. If it was North Korea, I might answer the question differently. It also would depend on who the occupying country was, and whether my own country was free to kick them out at any time. It's a shame that our military has damaged their reputation in many places around the world. On the other hand, there may be many wars which never happened because we were there as a deterent (unfortunately, history only tells us what happened, not what could have happened).
-jim
True (though it uses a different, backwards compatible, 9 pin connector). Alas, the flash drive's specifications list its maximum speed as 400mbps.
There was a story about this at Linux Weekly News.
-jim
-jim
I am considering voting for him, since I'm not impressed with Kerry (Who seems to promise alot without delving into details, and whom I disagree with on many issues) or Bush (Whom I generally agree with on many issues, but the execution of his ideas leaves a lot to be desired, and he still thinks the patriot act is a good idea). I do have some reservations about Badnarik, though. He seems to have an unrealistic view of the free market as the solution to everything. Capitalism is a very good thing, but if you don't understand the situations in which it fails, you're heading for disaster. For instance:
His ideas on free trade seem a little weird:
Maybe we shouldn't regulate trade as much as we do, but dropping all our trade rules would encourage other countries to take advantage of our relaxed policies, and tax trade heavily on their end instead of ours. Free trade requires mutual cooperation between countries, just like peace.
In terms of electricity, this is nonsense. If one entity controls the power lines coming into my house, and can charge whatever it likes, my power bills would certainly increase. PUDs exist for a reason. Having multiple electricity providers is expensive and unnecessary, but a single provider with no rules restricting its behavior would overcharge its customers and provide terrible service. Regulation of industry is sometimes a necessary evil.
Does he think that a terrorist group planning an attack on the United States might stop and say "Hey, maybe we should leave the US alone, because I like Pepsi and Macdonalds"? That seems a little naive. Has any country ever not attacked a neighbor because they're a convenient source of some useful product? (Not a rhetorical question, I'm actually curious.) Certainly the reverse happens quite alot - countries are attacked because the aggressor wants to take their resources. And what's wrong with foreign aid? Can't we do something nice for people once in awhile? We certainly could use a better reputation as a country.
The quotes come from a wikipedia article. I agree with Badnarik on most other issues, but he still seems to take an extreme stance sometimes that appears to be the product of an overly simplistic view of the way the world works (something almost everyone is guilty of at times). Maybe I'm taking his statements out of context. If so, someone please correct me.
-jim
Part of the challenge of the IFPC contest was that the ant language is significantly less powerful than what people are accustomed to coding in. In order to write anything that isn't horribly painful, you have to write your own compiler.
The only per-ant state that is remembered is the state number (ants are limited to 10000 states). For instance, in order to remember which way your ant is pointing you can't just remember it in some variable, you have to make six copies of your program and jump between copies any time you turn right or left.
What this means for the game is that when an ant reaches food, it can never remember how to get back without actually marking some sort of trail (which might lead nowhere). Coordinating complex behavior between multiple ants is difficult, though not impossible.
-jim
I guess the parent is a little redundant. My apologies.
-jim
Do you support approval voting or some other non-plurality voting system as a way to allow voters to support less popular candidates without "throwing their vote away"?
-jim
That's a bug, not a feature. If a NAT receives an IP packet from outside that's addressed to it's internal, unroutable network it should drop it on the floor (if it's not already filtered by your ISP). Perhaps not all NATs work that way, but it's not hard to imagine one that works correctly. If such a device no longer fits your definition of NAT, you should think about expanding your definition.
-jim
Maybe if you set up port forwarding, or you're using a broken NAT that uses a static table rather than full IP masquerade. Nothing behind the NAT has a globally routable IP address, so there's no way to send anything to it unless the NAT is configured to forward packets sent on a particular port, which it shouldn't do unless port forwarding is configured on that port or an internal machine has transmitted a packet to the outside world and the NAT remembered it's source port and internal IP so it can rewrite incoming reply packets.
If it's been said that many times, would it be that hard to cite a reference?You can't send a packet to a box behind a NAT unless it's part of a connection initiated by the machine behind the NAT. This makes it immune to all sorts of potential attacks from outside machines. NATs don't fix browser bugs or email worms, but they do prevent quite a few remote exploits.
-jim
The current network providers have little incentive to move to IPv6 because they make money through the artificial scarcity of IP addresses. They like the current situation because they have an advantage - new ISPs have trouble entering the market due to the lack of large contiguous IP blocks. When we start falling behind the rest of the world (since countries without enough IPs to go around have no reason to stick with IPv4), maybe they'll start switching to IPv6.
NAT is a solution, and it may be usefull in IPv6 networks as well as IPv4 for security reasons, but it shouldn't be forced on people (it interferes with the end-to-end philosophy of the internet). Also, not all countries have enough IPs for a one NAT per household policy.
-jim
-jim
-jim