Or criminal acts, in which case penalties and the chance to get caught are factored in as cost position.
That's exactly why revocation of the corporate charter should be the primary legal remedy for any provably intentional law-breaking on the part of any corporation. Upon revocation of the corporate charter, let all property of the corporation be sold at public auction and the proceeds divided among its shareholders. This would be a proper counterbalance to the "liability shield" nature of a corporation. Let the fines be reserved for unintentional negligence.
There are many such problems that we could put to rest, if only we really wanted to do it.
I was speaking strictly about how the people themselves may use technology to be more difficult to oppress. Your reply about how that technology may be used by the government to oppress the people is the other side of the coin.
Actually technology changes the number of people it takes to oppress an entire country. The current Iranian government is opposed by certainly at least a majority of Iranians, if not outright by 80-90% of the country. Yet those 10% manage to oppress the other parts quite effectively. Technology has enormously lowered the amount of people it takes to oppress a country completely.
That's worded as though you were telling me something new, which is a bit confusing. Really, this only reinforces my point that when things get that bad in Iran, there is no substitute for people willing to physically stand up for themselves. That's easier to do when only 10% are engaging in tyranny and would be much more difficult if it were the majority who were engaging in tyranny.
Because without guns, nothing changes. The world is based on reality. And the reality is simple : the person with the most and biggest guns makes the rules.
That's only because too many people are cowards, and a coward fears death more than he fears slavery. No tyrant wants to rule a ghost town.
You know what would break any government, no matter how powerful or oppressive it is? If the people stopped supporting it, stopped paying their taxes, and stopped serving in its military. When a small but courageous minority does this, they can be singled out and an example can be made of them. When the vast majority finds this kind of courage, it would quickly be shown what sort of weak nothing-human-beings these dictators really are without their authority structures.
That's pretty much the way the western world works. History only goes as far back as is convenient for the excuses of the next colonial venture.
Thank you for sharing that. What a refreshing contrast to the pissing contests, excessive showmanship, shallow thinking, deliberate polarization, and overall mental garbage exhibited by shows like Sean Hannity or the O'Reilly Factor. With those two shows in particular, even when they are right they are wrong because edification is the very last of their goals if it is even on the list.
There is unfortunately a shortage of men who will stand up for what they believe to be true and challenge the party line as the gentleman in that video has done. None of that has anything to do at all with whether I personally agree with him.
What they need is to have the US and it's pawns to stop threatening to invade, and stop sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the CIA for undercover operations fomenting another coup in that country. As long as they are being verbally and covertly threatened by the hyperpower that has just invaded the country next door -- the same country that invited Saddam to invade them in the 80s -- the hardliners will continue to rule Iran.
One simple rule that imperial powers tend to forget is that people are nearly always divided against their own government but nearly always united against a foreign invader.
How to get modded "Flamebait" on Slashdot: suggest that things like coups or terrorism don't just happen in a vacuum.
ARPA's Internet project grows out of control, works against sister agency's insurrection attempt.
I don't look at it this way. My view on it is simple.
There are some things that technology does not change. There is simply no substitute for a large mob of armed (with melee weapons if necessary) and very pissed off people surrounding a capital and demanding either the resignation, or the head, of a tyrant. Information and argumentation and documentation, which is what the Internet is good for, are useful for making sure things don't get to that point. For the Iranians, it's a bit too late for that.
Ask "Joe the Plumber" who asked, are you trying to tax me out of my ambitions?" (Paraphrasing) and the media scrambled to learn everything about him, ratting him out to the local union house so he can't get a job there, and starting a media wave to make him look like some kind of hick.
The message there is as clear as can be. If you stand up and ask real questions that were not pre-scripted and want a real answer, an attempt will be made to dig up dirt on you and otherwise to make you pay for that. The goal is that you will be intimidated so that others who were inclined to do the same will have a reason to sit down and shut up.
THEN WE CAN TALK ABOUT Palin. The only *real* choice in the last election, the Left is so afraid of her freedom-loving ways they want you to think she's a stupid dork with a white trash family. Most of the slashdotters here believe it for that reason.
I don't see it so much as a Left and Right issue, for both "sides" have gladly lead us down this ugly path while blaming each other the whole way. I think Palin has caught so much flak because she's much more of a genuine person and much less of a representative of a system. This is one of the few qualities that really does scare (and put to shame) the political-media machinery, because so much of what they do depends on demoralization (politics of fear) and dehumanization (treating the citizenry as a resource). This observation has absolutely nothing to do with whether I like her politics, but rather, is about what kind of person she is and why she does what she does.
Oh, no...Bush was never this restrictive, controlled the media, and Bush (being a dork that he was) was at least able to create jobs. The same cannot be said for THIS particular dork.But this dork wants POWER. And he wants it NOW. (See Cap-and-Trade legislation).
Again I think you are artificially restricting your thinking, just as you did when you said this is about "Left" (and "Right"). The monied interests who put Bush into power are the same as the monied interests who put Obama into power. They are all cut from the same cloth. Bush expanded executive power and thus, he helped to pave the way for what Obama is now doing. I would not be the least bit surprised if Obama does something similar for whoever comes after him. The people behind all of this are in it for the long haul and have no problem executing plans that take decades or generations to complete. Their motivation is somewhat religious in nature, so to them serving the Cause (of statism) is more important than whether their goals are realized during their own lifetimes.
Much of this is possible because the kind of people who are successful in politics are not regular people who happened to achieve their positions. We don't have that. What we have is a ruling class, and this ruling class has studied statecraft for many decades and has been careful to learn from past mistakes. The citizens, on the other hand, hardly ever learn anything from history and for the most part, just want to live their lives and spend time with their families. This is a situation best described as "no contest," at least until people wake up and realize that the destination of this path that we are on is easily known in advance.
Because the FBI are just a gaggle of incompetent Catholic and Mormon scumbags yearning for the good ol' days of the inquisition.
That's what happens when little god-fearing geeks who watched too many cop shows as children grow up to do their god's bidding using any means possible. And the motherfuckers can't even catch any real crooks.
This quite rightly deserves the "Flamebait" mod it received. Having said that, I still want to try and add something useful. I think your sentiment is accurate but your target is not.
There is indeed a religious element to this, but it's not the one you have identified. Statism is what you're dealing with here, which is the belief that the State as represented by the government needs to have powers expanded and its interests furthered at all costs. It follows that anytime there is a conflict of interests between the State and the citizenry, the State should prevail at the expense of the citizenry. Otherwise, statism is very much a religion. What's hard to understand and even harder to relate to is the derived concept that anything which increases state power is "morally right" and "good" no matter how much real harm it does. In the religion of statism, the government is "God" and can do no wrong, and neither can "God's" servants.
Both major political parties are faithful members of this religion. That's why neither of them is making any serious efforts to reduce the size and power of the federal government. No deficit is large enough to change this and no resemblance to the methods of various 20th century dictatorships is strong enough to give them pause. The mainstream news media is probably the single biggest part of the problem.
Where did our society go so wrong as to call acting on one's principles "juvenile wish fulfillment"?
The best way to avoid answering the question of "how could you abandon what you believe in?" is to call it something else.
And... thank you. It is heartening that I was not the only person to think something was really wrong with that. I must admit that was the first time I've ever seen anyone make the accusation that it is juvenile to be true to one's principles.
If a right is violated, and no one can talk about it,
then it must not have happened.
Indeed, and it's scary how that seems to be the point. Also from the fine summary:
and as part of that investigation they've compelled the secrecy of a service provider
If that provider had any sort of decency or respect for this country, they would hold a press conference or equivalent and make sure everybody knew all about this shady deal. That kind of courage and good priorities are unfortunately quite rare. There's a lot of cheap talk about "patriotism" but that is what a real patriot would do. Of course I use that definition (that I wish I could attribute right now) which goes "a patriot supports his country all of the time, and his government only when it deserves it." These days, that would mean refusing to support the government most (or all) of the time.
Makes me wonder how many cases the FBI handles that have nothing to do with an activitiy which crosses state lines or otherwise could not be handled on the local and state level...
Actually that might work... Sails on boats work like wings, that's how it's possible to sail upwind.
If the sail was positioned at 90 degrees and then the fan blew across the front of it, you'd create the Bernoulli effect, with the lower pressure air behind the sail pushing you forward. Of course in the configuration in the cartoon I expect Wile E. was just blowing it from behind, in which case it wouldn't work at all.
Yes, the cartoon portrayed the latter case. The way Wile E. was doing it, any force acting on the sail (wanting to move it forward) would be entirely counteracted and cancelled out by an equal and opposite force acting on the fan (wanting to move it backward). Yet somehow he got moving, and quickly. Of course he didn't get the roadrunner...
At night, a grid of halogen headlamps mounted over the solar panels is activated.
Reminds me of the Looney Tunes and WIle E. Coyote. He would get a platform on wheels and put a sail on it and then a fan, also mounted on the same platform, would blow air at the sail and... somehow this would get him moving.
I wonder if they could ever make an ultralight version so that you would be allowed to fly one without a pilot's license. At least in the USA you can fly small, personal ultralight aircraft with no pilot's license if the craft meets certain criteria. I would imagine they would need to get it working/economical first and then worry about making it more compact but I sure would like to see something like that.
I guess I agree with you there, but have you tried clicking on the 'help' and 'troubleshoot' buttons in any Microsoft OS dialogs? Try it now, and see if you learn anything:o)
I did laugh at that! The help dialogs are not unlike how a lot of computer classes are taught or how a lot of computer books are written. They have lots of steps and procedures and very little explanation of "why THOSE steps" so they promote an atmosphere of plenty of knowledge and very little understanding. In this way they are very much like modern public schools. It's a shame that we value technicians so much more than philosophers.
>You really will have to learn a whole new system and all the complications that entails.
That might be valid for us techies, but the complete and utter ignorance and confusion I see from normal people using Windows suggests that moving to Linux would not be any worse.
I really do pity the average home user.
I don't pity them for one reason: whenever I try to use something I don't understand, I do not expect good results. If I try that and get bad results, I don't cry "foul" because I don't blame anyone but myself. For me to consider pitying them, I'd need a solid answer as to why they think this principle does not apply to them.
In other words, choices have consequences. You can decide that learning the basics of the tool you are using is "too hard" or "only for hardcore techies" (and fail to appreciate the staggering difference between basic competency and expertise). Sure, you can do that, but as a consequence you're likely to have problems that a more informed user would know how to prevent. I don't see anything inherently unfair or wrong with that.
There was a time, before Microsoft and before Open Source, where a purchase of software meant that you were buying a copy of the source code.
I am curious as to what OS you have in mind. I have worked with computers since the '70s, and although it was customary for an assembler to be provided, I don't recall a single vendor that released the OS source code.
The big-iron Unix vendors really did not provide any source code, not even for the kernel and not even under some sort of NDA?
Really asking; I had the impression that they did but I honestly don't know.
Sure, DNS is a single point of failure with security implications. What else is new? Half my talk last year showed what sort of damage you could do if you could corrupt any DNS name. The root can, today.
I guess what I am asking is this: such a failure that results in corrupting a DNS name is already bad enough. Would it not be worse if many other security mechanisms also depended on it?
What makes DNSSEC better than using protocols (such as SSH) which can independently verify the identity of a host by means of cryptographic signatures? This to me also seems consistent with the idea that good security is done in layers, not by single ultimate solutions.
So, how many people do you have in your GPG keyring? Few dozen? Few hundred? I spent six months interacting with people over email securely. It added an average of 72 hours of time before work could be done, and often it didn't work. C'mon, this ain't scaling.
Actually with the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird, I can check the public key servers to quickly add anyone's key to my keyring with two mouse clicks. I believe this option shows for any e-mail that is cryptographically signed. Thus, the current size of my keyring is much less important to me than the ease by which it may be dynamically expanded on an as-needed basis. So my answer is that at least in my experience, this has never been a problem for me. Thus, for me, the ways that DNSSEC would address this amounts to a solution looking for a problem. I admit that I may be an unusual example though if so, I'd be interested in why it isn't so simple for others.
I am curious as to why you had so many problems with gnupg (you did not specify). Is that because you have found identifiable design flaws in gnupg, or is it because of user error on the part of folks with whom you were communicating? If the problem was user error, which is people working with what they do not understand, will a centralized security mechanism automatically fix that, or will it merely replace one thing they do not understand with another? I am rather skeptical of any attempts to solve problems caused by user error that don't actually seek to train those users, as this seems like an unwillingness to address the actual problem. That's especially true for security, which among all issues is one of the most unforgiving of ignorance or incompetence.
Given that Win 7 is essentially just a Vista service pack by another name, I will not be paying several hundred bucks to upgrade. I'll stick with XP until it is unsupported, and then I'll switch away from Microsoft altogether.
Thank you. I was starting to wonder if Windows users had infinite patience for Microsoft or if eventually a point can be reached where they get fed up enough to go elsewhere. People who have enough reason will display a "suck it up" attitude towards the difficulties of moving to another platform, which I won't downplay. You really will have to learn a whole new system and all the complications that entails. It will be well worth your time, however. Especially if you go with a Unix-like system, you will develop a skillset that will transfer to many other environments.
$30-40 I might just have considered paying, after trying Win7 myself to confirm that the problems were solved. What *should* have happened, though, was a free upgrade to the equivalent version for anybody who returned a retail copy of Vista, and a $30-40 paid upgrade to Win7 or a free downgrade to WinXP for anybody who bought a PC with Vista included.
That would be the customer-friendly option, particularly for a company which is certainly not hurting for cash and is well able to afford to do that. Really that just reinforces what sort of company you're dealing with. Now, I don't like Microsoft and I make no secret of that, but this isn't meant to be gratuitous bashing. I think your grievance against them is quite legitimate and that there's nothing wrong with saying so.
Never saw ANY of the benefits/Ultimate Content that was promised.
The upgrade from Vista Ultimate to Win 7 Ultimate should be free.
That will teach me for buying a boxed, non-OEM version of Windows I guess.
Personally, when I receive a promise from a company and feel that they didn't deliver, I show my dissatisfaction with that company by no longer buying their products. That is, I try not to support business practices that are abusive or unfavorable or fail to deliver. That works because in most markets there are other companies to choose from.
If there were any real competition in this market, you'd probably be saying "that will teach me for buying Microsoft". Just think about that.
I find the (Slashdot) story title and summary to be a bit misleading, though I doubt that was intentional. As a result, I think most of the replies to you fail to appreciate that you are not really talking about fixing a flaw in DNS; you are talking about using DNS as an infrastructure to make many more things start depending on it. From TFA:
DNSSEC is interesting not because it fixes DNS. DNSSEC is interesting because it allows us to start addressing core problems we have on the Internet in a systematic and scalable way. The reality is: Trust is not selling across organizational boundaries. We have lots and lots systems that allow companies to authenticate their own people, manage and monitor their own people and interact with their own people. In a world where companies only deal with themselves, that's great. We don't live in that world and we haven't for many years.
And:
DNS has been doing cross-organizational address management for 25 years; it works great. DNS is the world's largest PKI without the 'K.'All DNSSEC does is add keys. It takes this system that scales wonderfully and has been a success for 25 years, and says our trust problems are cross-organizational, and takes best technology on the Internet for cross-organizational operations and gives it trust. And if we do this right, we'll see every single company with new products and services around the fact that there's one trusted root, and one trusted delegating proven system doing security across organizational boundaries.
That seriously sounds like a single point of failure. Please explain to me why that's not a bad idea? Or to put that another way, what happens when this "one trusted root" is finally compromised? I imagine that it would be a most attractive target.
It's 2009 and we don't have secure email. When we get DNNSEC, we will be able to build secure email and secure technology up and down the stack and it will scale.
Please speak for yourself. Cryptography and Open Source have provided the means for both secure and securely authenticated e-mail for years now. Anyone who wants to use those tools can get them, so I am forced to conclude that whether it's right or wrong, most people just don't care about secure e-mail (I wish they did but forcing it on them would be wrong). So, what do I gain by giving up gnupg/enigmail and replacing it with more dependence on DNS?
That also depends on the market. If the widget market is a high-margin business with high barriers to entry (what companies like to call "competitive moats"), then an increase in tax rates will tend to just reduce profits. The profit margins would still be high even post-tax, so there's no reason for companies to exit the business, so supply isn't reduced.
Classical economics basically assumes that costs of goods and services approach their cost of production, plus a marginal profit at the minimum needed to ensure that people will bother staying in the market at all. Many markets don't operate like that ideal, though, and instead have quite high profit margins. In those cases, you can't really directly apply the classical analysis, because conditions are aren't at the equilibrium that it assumes. Instead, you have to analyze the specific factors of the market to figure out why profit margins are high, which will tell you something about whether tax increases are likely to raise prices, or instead reduce margins.
Thank you for an actual explanation. I am willing to learn but it's harder to do that when the only thing the ACs are willing to tell me is "HAH YOU FAIL!" without explaining why. What they call competitive moats, is that really very common? I can only think of a few off-hand, like cellphone companies for example.
It makes a person wonder just how long ago music was enjoyed (besides whistling or singing) or did we just grunt our way around?
The more I learn about the subject, the more convinced I am that the ancients were not the unsophisticated primitives that we often imagine them to be.
Norwegian left Norwegian right Democrats Republicans
It really scares me how narrow the political spectrum in the US is.
What bothers me is that it is a spectrum at all. The reason why political spectrums can be accurately represented by two points (defining the extremes) and a line (defining the possible middle points) is because it is one-dimensional thinking.
It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein: "The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them."
Lots of our problems that seem to be insoluble are only insoluble according to the systems which created them. This is why the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans that exists in the USA is a stranglehold that is greatly stifling the sort of new ideas (such as the Fair Tax Act) that would help to reverse some of the damage that has been done.
A company can't just raise prices without decreasing demand, except for in extreme edge cases.
In isolation, no. However, taxes have a unique status among all other expenses: they tend to affect all companies equally. So if you make widgets, and your tax rate increases, so does the rate of all other companies making widgets. Result: price of widgets increases by some margin. The supply-and-demand scenario you mention does not apply here.
It'd be nice if you would address this before being so quick to declare a "fail".
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly why revocation of the corporate charter should be the primary legal remedy for any provably intentional law-breaking on the part of any corporation. Upon revocation of the corporate charter, let all property of the corporation be sold at public auction and the proceeds divided among its shareholders. This would be a proper counterbalance to the "liability shield" nature of a corporation. Let the fines be reserved for unintentional negligence.
There are many such problems that we could put to rest, if only we really wanted to do it.
That's worded as though you were telling me something new, which is a bit confusing. Really, this only reinforces my point that when things get that bad in Iran, there is no substitute for people willing to physically stand up for themselves. That's easier to do when only 10% are engaging in tyranny and would be much more difficult if it were the majority who were engaging in tyranny.
That's only because too many people are cowards, and a coward fears death more than he fears slavery. No tyrant wants to rule a ghost town.
You know what would break any government, no matter how powerful or oppressive it is? If the people stopped supporting it, stopped paying their taxes, and stopped serving in its military. When a small but courageous minority does this, they can be singled out and an example can be made of them. When the vast majority finds this kind of courage, it would quickly be shown what sort of weak nothing-human-beings these dictators really are without their authority structures.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=249JaIaubVw
That's pretty much the way the western world works. History only goes as far back as is convenient for the excuses of the next colonial venture.
Thank you for sharing that. What a refreshing contrast to the pissing contests, excessive showmanship, shallow thinking, deliberate polarization, and overall mental garbage exhibited by shows like Sean Hannity or the O'Reilly Factor. With those two shows in particular, even when they are right they are wrong because edification is the very last of their goals if it is even on the list.
There is unfortunately a shortage of men who will stand up for what they believe to be true and challenge the party line as the gentleman in that video has done. None of that has anything to do at all with whether I personally agree with him.
What they need is to have the US and it's pawns to stop threatening to invade, and stop sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the CIA for undercover operations fomenting another coup in that country. As long as they are being verbally and covertly threatened by the hyperpower that has just invaded the country next door -- the same country that invited Saddam to invade them in the 80s -- the hardliners will continue to rule Iran.
One simple rule that imperial powers tend to forget is that people are nearly always divided against their own government but nearly always united against a foreign invader.
How to get modded "Flamebait" on Slashdot: suggest that things like coups or terrorism don't just happen in a vacuum.
ARPA's Internet project grows out of control, works against sister agency's insurrection attempt.
I don't look at it this way. My view on it is simple.
There are some things that technology does not change. There is simply no substitute for a large mob of armed (with melee weapons if necessary) and very pissed off people surrounding a capital and demanding either the resignation, or the head, of a tyrant. Information and argumentation and documentation, which is what the Internet is good for, are useful for making sure things don't get to that point. For the Iranians, it's a bit too late for that.
The term for that is "divide and conquer". It's an age-old device that works as well today as it did thousands of years ago. Unfortunately.
The message there is as clear as can be. If you stand up and ask real questions that were not pre-scripted and want a real answer, an attempt will be made to dig up dirt on you and otherwise to make you pay for that. The goal is that you will be intimidated so that others who were inclined to do the same will have a reason to sit down and shut up.
I don't see it so much as a Left and Right issue, for both "sides" have gladly lead us down this ugly path while blaming each other the whole way. I think Palin has caught so much flak because she's much more of a genuine person and much less of a representative of a system. This is one of the few qualities that really does scare (and put to shame) the political-media machinery, because so much of what they do depends on demoralization (politics of fear) and dehumanization (treating the citizenry as a resource). This observation has absolutely nothing to do with whether I like her politics, but rather, is about what kind of person she is and why she does what she does.
Again I think you are artificially restricting your thinking, just as you did when you said this is about "Left" (and "Right"). The monied interests who put Bush into power are the same as the monied interests who put Obama into power. They are all cut from the same cloth. Bush expanded executive power and thus, he helped to pave the way for what Obama is now doing. I would not be the least bit surprised if Obama does something similar for whoever comes after him. The people behind all of this are in it for the long haul and have no problem executing plans that take decades or generations to complete. Their motivation is somewhat religious in nature, so to them serving the Cause (of statism) is more important than whether their goals are realized during their own lifetimes.
Much of this is possible because the kind of people who are successful in politics are not regular people who happened to achieve their positions. We don't have that. What we have is a ruling class, and this ruling class has studied statecraft for many decades and has been careful to learn from past mistakes. The citizens, on the other hand, hardly ever learn anything from history and for the most part, just want to live their lives and spend time with their families. This is a situation best described as "no contest," at least until people wake up and realize that the destination of this path that we are on is easily known in advance.
Because the FBI are just a gaggle of incompetent Catholic and Mormon scumbags yearning for the good ol' days of the inquisition. That's what happens when little god-fearing geeks who watched too many cop shows as children grow up to do their god's bidding using any means possible. And the motherfuckers can't even catch any real crooks.
This quite rightly deserves the "Flamebait" mod it received. Having said that, I still want to try and add something useful. I think your sentiment is accurate but your target is not.
There is indeed a religious element to this, but it's not the one you have identified. Statism is what you're dealing with here, which is the belief that the State as represented by the government needs to have powers expanded and its interests furthered at all costs. It follows that anytime there is a conflict of interests between the State and the citizenry, the State should prevail at the expense of the citizenry. Otherwise, statism is very much a religion. What's hard to understand and even harder to relate to is the derived concept that anything which increases state power is "morally right" and "good" no matter how much real harm it does. In the religion of statism, the government is "God" and can do no wrong, and neither can "God's" servants.
Both major political parties are faithful members of this religion. That's why neither of them is making any serious efforts to reduce the size and power of the federal government. No deficit is large enough to change this and no resemblance to the methods of various 20th century dictatorships is strong enough to give them pause. The mainstream news media is probably the single biggest part of the problem.
Where did our society go so wrong as to call acting on one's principles "juvenile wish fulfillment"?
The best way to avoid answering the question of "how could you abandon what you believe in?" is to call it something else.
... thank you. It is heartening that I was not the only person to think something was really wrong with that. I must admit that was the first time I've ever seen anyone make the accusation that it is juvenile to be true to one's principles.
And
If a right is violated, and no one can talk about it, then it must not have happened.
Indeed, and it's scary how that seems to be the point. Also from the fine summary:
If that provider had any sort of decency or respect for this country, they would hold a press conference or equivalent and make sure everybody knew all about this shady deal. That kind of courage and good priorities are unfortunately quite rare. There's a lot of cheap talk about "patriotism" but that is what a real patriot would do. Of course I use that definition (that I wish I could attribute right now) which goes "a patriot supports his country all of the time, and his government only when it deserves it." These days, that would mean refusing to support the government most (or all) of the time.
...
Makes me wonder how many cases the FBI handles that have nothing to do with an activitiy which crosses state lines or otherwise could not be handled on the local and state level
Actually that might work... Sails on boats work like wings, that's how it's possible to sail upwind. If the sail was positioned at 90 degrees and then the fan blew across the front of it, you'd create the Bernoulli effect, with the lower pressure air behind the sail pushing you forward. Of course in the configuration in the cartoon I expect Wile E. was just blowing it from behind, in which case it wouldn't work at all.
Yes, the cartoon portrayed the latter case. The way Wile E. was doing it, any force acting on the sail (wanting to move it forward) would be entirely counteracted and cancelled out by an equal and opposite force acting on the fan (wanting to move it backward). Yet somehow he got moving, and quickly. Of course he didn't get the roadrunner...
At night, a grid of halogen headlamps mounted over the solar panels is activated.
Reminds me of the Looney Tunes and WIle E. Coyote. He would get a platform on wheels and put a sail on it and then a fan, also mounted on the same platform, would blow air at the sail and ... somehow this would get him moving.
I wonder if they could ever make an ultralight version so that you would be allowed to fly one without a pilot's license. At least in the USA you can fly small, personal ultralight aircraft with no pilot's license if the craft meets certain criteria. I would imagine they would need to get it working/economical first and then worry about making it more compact but I sure would like to see something like that.
I guess I agree with you there, but have you tried clicking on the 'help' and 'troubleshoot' buttons in any Microsoft OS dialogs? Try it now, and see if you learn anything :o)
I did laugh at that! The help dialogs are not unlike how a lot of computer classes are taught or how a lot of computer books are written. They have lots of steps and procedures and very little explanation of "why THOSE steps" so they promote an atmosphere of plenty of knowledge and very little understanding. In this way they are very much like modern public schools. It's a shame that we value technicians so much more than philosophers.
>You really will have to learn a whole new system and all the complications that entails.
That might be valid for us techies, but the complete and utter ignorance and confusion I see from normal people using Windows suggests that moving to Linux would not be any worse.
I really do pity the average home user.
I don't pity them for one reason: whenever I try to use something I don't understand, I do not expect good results. If I try that and get bad results, I don't cry "foul" because I don't blame anyone but myself. For me to consider pitying them, I'd need a solid answer as to why they think this principle does not apply to them.
In other words, choices have consequences. You can decide that learning the basics of the tool you are using is "too hard" or "only for hardcore techies" (and fail to appreciate the staggering difference between basic competency and expertise). Sure, you can do that, but as a consequence you're likely to have problems that a more informed user would know how to prevent. I don't see anything inherently unfair or wrong with that.
There was a time, before Microsoft and before Open Source, where a purchase of software meant that you were buying a copy of the source code. I am curious as to what OS you have in mind. I have worked with computers since the '70s, and although it was customary for an assembler to be provided, I don't recall a single vendor that released the OS source code.
The big-iron Unix vendors really did not provide any source code, not even for the kernel and not even under some sort of NDA?
Really asking; I had the impression that they did but I honestly don't know.
I guess what I am asking is this: such a failure that results in corrupting a DNS name is already bad enough. Would it not be worse if many other security mechanisms also depended on it?
What makes DNSSEC better than using protocols (such as SSH) which can independently verify the identity of a host by means of cryptographic signatures? This to me also seems consistent with the idea that good security is done in layers, not by single ultimate solutions.
Actually with the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird, I can check the public key servers to quickly add anyone's key to my keyring with two mouse clicks. I believe this option shows for any e-mail that is cryptographically signed. Thus, the current size of my keyring is much less important to me than the ease by which it may be dynamically expanded on an as-needed basis. So my answer is that at least in my experience, this has never been a problem for me. Thus, for me, the ways that DNSSEC would address this amounts to a solution looking for a problem. I admit that I may be an unusual example though if so, I'd be interested in why it isn't so simple for others.
I am curious as to why you had so many problems with gnupg (you did not specify). Is that because you have found identifiable design flaws in gnupg, or is it because of user error on the part of folks with whom you were communicating? If the problem was user error, which is people working with what they do not understand, will a centralized security mechanism automatically fix that, or will it merely replace one thing they do not understand with another? I am rather skeptical of any attempts to solve problems caused by user error that don't actually seek to train those users, as this seems like an unwillingness to address the actual problem. That's especially true for security, which among all issues is one of the most unforgiving of ignorance or incompetence.
Thank you. I was starting to wonder if Windows users had infinite patience for Microsoft or if eventually a point can be reached where they get fed up enough to go elsewhere. People who have enough reason will display a "suck it up" attitude towards the difficulties of moving to another platform, which I won't downplay. You really will have to learn a whole new system and all the complications that entails. It will be well worth your time, however. Especially if you go with a Unix-like system, you will develop a skillset that will transfer to many other environments.
That would be the customer-friendly option, particularly for a company which is certainly not hurting for cash and is well able to afford to do that. Really that just reinforces what sort of company you're dealing with. Now, I don't like Microsoft and I make no secret of that, but this isn't meant to be gratuitous bashing. I think your grievance against them is quite legitimate and that there's nothing wrong with saying so.
Personally, when I receive a promise from a company and feel that they didn't deliver, I show my dissatisfaction with that company by no longer buying their products. That is, I try not to support business practices that are abusive or unfavorable or fail to deliver. That works because in most markets there are other companies to choose from.
If there were any real competition in this market, you'd probably be saying "that will teach me for buying Microsoft". Just think about that.
And:
That seriously sounds like a single point of failure. Please explain to me why that's not a bad idea? Or to put that another way, what happens when this "one trusted root" is finally compromised? I imagine that it would be a most attractive target.
Please speak for yourself. Cryptography and Open Source have provided the means for both secure and securely authenticated e-mail for years now. Anyone who wants to use those tools can get them, so I am forced to conclude that whether it's right or wrong, most people just don't care about secure e-mail (I wish they did but forcing it on them would be wrong). So, what do I gain by giving up gnupg/enigmail and replacing it with more dependence on DNS?
That also depends on the market. If the widget market is a high-margin business with high barriers to entry (what companies like to call "competitive moats"), then an increase in tax rates will tend to just reduce profits. The profit margins would still be high even post-tax, so there's no reason for companies to exit the business, so supply isn't reduced.
Classical economics basically assumes that costs of goods and services approach their cost of production, plus a marginal profit at the minimum needed to ensure that people will bother staying in the market at all. Many markets don't operate like that ideal, though, and instead have quite high profit margins. In those cases, you can't really directly apply the classical analysis, because conditions are aren't at the equilibrium that it assumes. Instead, you have to analyze the specific factors of the market to figure out why profit margins are high, which will tell you something about whether tax increases are likely to raise prices, or instead reduce margins.
Thank you for an actual explanation. I am willing to learn but it's harder to do that when the only thing the ACs are willing to tell me is "HAH YOU FAIL!" without explaining why. What they call competitive moats, is that really very common? I can only think of a few off-hand, like cellphone companies for example.
It makes a person wonder just how long ago music was enjoyed (besides whistling or singing) or did we just grunt our way around?
The more I learn about the subject, the more convinced I am that the ancients were not the unsophisticated primitives that we often imagine them to be.
OK.
I love the political difference:
Norwegian left Norwegian right Democrats Republicans
It really scares me how narrow the political spectrum in the US is.
What bothers me is that it is a spectrum at all. The reason why political spectrums can be accurately represented by two points (defining the extremes) and a line (defining the possible middle points) is because it is one-dimensional thinking.
It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein: "The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them."
Lots of our problems that seem to be insoluble are only insoluble according to the systems which created them. This is why the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans that exists in the USA is a stranglehold that is greatly stifling the sort of new ideas (such as the Fair Tax Act) that would help to reverse some of the damage that has been done.
In isolation, no. However, taxes have a unique status among all other expenses: they tend to affect all companies equally. So if you make widgets, and your tax rate increases, so does the rate of all other companies making widgets. Result: price of widgets increases by some margin. The supply-and-demand scenario you mention does not apply here.
It'd be nice if you would address this before being so quick to declare a "fail".