A long long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax), when there were wolves in Wales --- oh, wait, that's mixing metaphors waaaayyy too far..... Anyway
So email wasn't originally just an SMTP-over-TCP/IP thing. There were many different protocols for email, some of them less incompatible with each other than others were, and getting just about anywhere required relays of some sort. A couple of the bigger parts of the world were the Arpanet (which was small then, and only defense contractors and some universities were allowed on), and UUCP (the Unix file copy program that Unix mail often used, and which used relays as its inherent way to do anything), and Netnews / Usenet, and BITnet (which ran on evil IBM EBCDIC systems), and CSNET and Phonenet and Fidonet and X.25.
"Unix-to-Unix Copy Program," said PDP-1. "You will never find a more wretched hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious."
Mostly relays were open, except for connecting to expensive services where you might want to limit who could run up your phone bill. Eventually the Honey DanBer version of UUCP changed the default behaviour to only accept incoming UUCP requests from systems that you knew how to connect back to (which made it possible for bouncegrams to be reliable) and made fanatically reliable bouncegram support available. But basically, sendmail emerged as the popular program to relay mail as well as delivering it, and relaying was of course open by default because that let you have more ways to deliver mail, and meant that you didn't have to write eleventeen different protocol-specific methods for _closing_ relay capability to unauthorized users. And they didn't need to be closed, because social pressure pretty much prevented spamming for a long time, even in parts of the network that weren't subject to the ARPANET Acceptable Use Policy of non-commerciality and/or official business only.
Why did they stay open when spammer relay abuse started becoming a problem? Partly because it took a while for MAPS to start bullying big ISPs into closing their relays, partly because there are millions of small systems with people who don't know detailed email system administration (Did you know that you can write a Turing Machine in sendmail.cf?), and partly because there's lots of broken software that nobody's really maintaining carefully. At least current versions of sendmail and other popular Unix mailers come with relays closed by default.
But some of us miss the old days, when the Net was more of a community, and running open relays was the neighborly thing to do, rather than an attractive nuisance that will be abused if discovered.
If you're running your own sendmail, it'll reject any messages to bogus addresses; obviously it'd be nice to teergrube that so the failure messages take a long time. If somebody else is doing your sendmail, and is forwarding you all the messages to all addresses, good or bad, that's annoying, or even if you're getting postmaster-grams for all the bogus addresses.
But usually this doesn't happen if all you've got is a subdomain from an email provider, and if everybody had unlimited user names inside their own subdomain instead of the more common conventions, dictionary attacks would scale very badly for spammers, especially if attempts to reach bad addresses led to long or increasing delays in responding.
There are lots of Earth Viewer projects out there, either on the net or off.
Microsoft Terraserver.com is one of the big ones, selling images from lots of satellite sources. Originally a 1998 joint venture with MS, USGS and Compaq. Free lower-res stuff, subscription medium-res, high-res pictures for sale.
Good grief - the BBC is the usually-well-behaved British Government radio/TV network. Like the US's Nationalist Public Radio, it has some independence and _lots_ of professionalism, but it knows who it works for, and the British government has pretty much been toadying for the US since Reagan and Iron Maggie. Just because they're not rabid Bush syncophants like Fox News or because they also play coverage of Parliamentary debates (which do have a wide range of opinions with much better ranting than most US Congress debate) doesn't mean they're Traitors to America like the French are (oh, wait, both Britain and France are supposed to be independent countries:-)
If you can't get your window system to use the fonts you like for the resolution your screen runs at, get better window software - we've had it for over 15 years!. You can probably make most of it in X if you can't do it in Windows, but it's been done better by other people.
Sun's NeWS network extensible windowing system was a Postscript-based window system in ~1987 that was much more flexible than X about what objects lived where, and what you saw on the screen really was what you got on paper. OK, it was written in Postscript, debugging was marginal at best, crashing was ugly and undebuggable, and security was non-existent (:-), but Gosling who wrote it was able to carry over many of the lessons to Java.
Display Postscript, which the NeXT folks picked up, wasn't quite as powerful, but most programmers who used the stuff raved about it, and being Postscript-based it looked really nice. How much of that is still there in OSX?
FreeS/WAN is the Linux free IPSEC implementation being developed outside the US by a group funded by John Gilmore, which is not only open-source, but isn't restricted by the US export regulations on crypto. (The regulations were relaxed a couple of years ago, largely due to EFF-related lawsuits, development like FreeS/WAN and Mozilla, and the needs of commercial business, but the Feds periodically threaten to tighten or reinstate them again.)
So Gilmore and his crew have been giving out lights for a couple of years that with stickers saying "Linux Freeswan.org" on them, originally in colors and later in white LED when that came out. By now they'd like you to buy your own Photon lights (:-), but in the crypto-geek community they're fairly common keychain accessories. Aside from using them as blinky-light toys, I've found them useful for looking inside and under things, repairing cars in the dark, etc., and the keychain size means I've always got one with me.
Re:Michael Moore's Letter to Governor Bush
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Go read the Constitution for a while, and the history that goes along with it, particularly the Anti-Federalist papers and the Federalist papers.
Declaring war and waging war are much different issues - declaring war is a policy question, and that's Congress's responsibility. As Commander in Chief, yes, the President is better positioned to know militarily how to send the right soldiers to the right places to kill the enemies that Congress wants killed, but it's Congress's job to decide who those enemies are and whether to kill them or negotiate with them, which is NOT a military decision. It can be _influenced_ by military decisions (if the head of the Army says we're not strong enough to kill Enemy A, and they're not currently invading us, Congress should probably decide not to try to kill them.)
The US government has Constitutional permission to regulate interstate commerce, and to lay excise taxes on things. At the time the Prohibition amendment was passed, nobody really realized how far those powers could be twisted and abused - this was well before Franklin Roosevelt quasi-nationalized everything and before income taxes were the huge funding source and policy lever that they are today, and Federal courts were generally business-friendly.
Under the more obvious understandings of what regulation of interstate commerce meant, the Federal government could have banned alcohol transportation between states, but couldn't ban alcohol manufacture or possession outright, or force uncooperative states to ban it, so the Prohibitionist politicians couldn't achieve the Total World Domination they wanted. They probably could have gotten liquor banned in most of the country for a while, but they probably couldn't have gotten it banned everywhere, or as totally as they wanted (e.g. Demon Rum vs. less-demonic beer), and state lawmakers that banned it when that was popular could later unban it any time 51% of them wanted their booze back. The Amendment gave them the power to make the ban "permanent" and enforce it on everybody.
During the 1930s, the Feds discovered that they could essentially ban things by using excise taxes - first there was the $200 tax on machine guns, which could be 6-12 months' wages for a laborer, and then the Marihuana taxes which were also nearly prohibitionary (but easily evaded), and then the obvious idea that the Feds wouldn't collect the tax or issue receipt stamps, so even if you wanted to pay their extortion you couldn't. And then Roosevelt's takeover of the economy and packing of the Supreme Court let the Feds get away with cases like forbidding a farmer to grow grain on his own land to feed to his own hogs because he'd have otherwise bought that grain on the open market, which is potentially interstate commerce - if you read the Federal drug laws (I think it's Title 10), they start off by asserting that it's difficult to tell where a given batch of drugs comes from, and therefore whether they're involved in Interstate Commerce, and therefore Congress was presuming jurisdiction over all of them. (By the way, that might be a trick that states or cities that want to provide medical marijuana can exploit.)
And since then the Feds have discovered that they can force states to do almost anything using leverage like cutting off all highway funds or other kinds of revenue-sharing if they don't follow the Feds' orders on a wide variety of topics such as requiring drivers' licenses records to collect Social Security Numbers.
It'll be a long hard climb out of this hole we're in.
Re:Michael Moore's Letter to Governor Bush
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Bush and his friends in the Florida government tried very hard to delay the process to get past the deadline, and succeeded in changing the rules several times during the process, and Gore and the Democrats were not competent enough to play the game successfully and beat them (or to figure out which counties the _real_ cheating was happening it, which apparently were some areas that the press didn't notice.) The fact that the Supremes are in charge of deciding who won, and did so, is separate from the fact that Bush was *trying* to prevent the votes from being counted accurately, which he shouldn't have done, and preventing the votes from being counted after the fact by the press, which was even more important, and of course there's the problem that the voter registration system had serious problems, incorrectly disenfranchising a large number of Floridians who would primarily have voted Democrat.
Re:Michael Moore's Letter to Governor Bush
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Maybe those men and women have pledged their lives to support our freedoms - many of the soldiers I've known thought that was the job they were signing up for, though many others signed up just because they wanted to make some money for college or gain some experience with the world and get off the farm or out of the ghetto or play in the marching band, and some were chaplains who want to serve the needs of the men and women who are in the military. That's not what Bush is using them for, and to say that we should support his imperialist actions because they're brave men and women is to disrespect their bravery.
Furthermore, just because they've pledged their lives to support our freedoms doesn't relieve them of the individual responsibility to do the right thing - not only is that straightforward moral principle, it's US law: the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires US soldiers to disobey illegal orders, and that doesn't mean they can depend on their superior officers to tell them what's legal - those rules are there because of the Nurnberg "I vas only following orders" defenses, and the importance of them was reinforced by events like the My Lai massacre of unarmed civilians in Vietnam.
Furthermore, under the US Constitution, Congress is supposed to be in charge of deciding whether to have a war, and the President is only in charge of getting the job done once they've told him what to do, just as they're also responsible for setting foreign policy, which the Executive Branch is in charge of implementing. They've wimped out and let the last few Presidents walk all over them, and Bush should be roundly criticized for continuing this tradition, which of course he has largely gotten away with because of 9/11.
Separately from the immorality of Bush's actions, there's the problem that he *is* increasing the chances of terrorists attacking the US territory, and attacking Americans overseas, and attacking our allies such as Israel, because he's increasing the number of people who are severely pissed off at the US, like the bunch of Saudis who did the 9/11 atrocities, and by using them to provide military aid and training to other civilian-oppressing militaries around the world (like the Indonesians, and many of the Latin American tyrannies over the years), he's doing more of this.
Re:Michael Moore's Letter to Governor Bush
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While Michael Moore writes entertaining flames, I disagree with him more than half the time:-) However, while you may believe, as Nixon appeared to, that the Office of the Presidency deserves respect, that doesn't mean that the occupant of that office lives up to the chair he's sitting in, and when he falls short of that, as the current Occupant so blatantly has, respect for the office includes upbraiding him for it. Bush lies through his teeth - he's worse than his father, who at least did so competently, and worse than Clinton, who mainly lied about his personal life, not that any of them had any more principles than Nixon.
In particular, respecting the office includes respecting the process of Getting Elected To It, and in my opinion, delaying and preventing recounts of the votes through any procedural tricks possible, which the Florida Republicans did, and taking it to the Supreme Court to prevent a recount, doesn't strike me as respecting that process. (That doesn't mean that the Democrats didn't incompetently botch their part of that job - they did. It also doesn't mean that they wouldn't have stolen it if they could - they've had some small experience with that in the past... Or that having his brother in charge of the gross mismanagement of elections didn't make the situation look worse than it was.)
Some of those systems were put in place to discourage development and widespread deployment of DGPS systems, and to retain some government centralized countrol of the technology. If there's ever a major ICBM attack on the US, you can bet that those things will be turned off right away, and any planes that were depending on them are going to have to land the old-fashioned way.
If you're trying to nuke civilians, sure, what's an extra 100 meters when you're trying to punish somebody for having Weapons of Mass Destruction. But the real concern with GPS accuracy has been pre-emptive ICBM strikes taking out missile silos, and there it matters quite a lot whether you're hitting the hardened silo on the lid or 100 meters away.
The early news discussions were predicting the war would cost about $200 billion. That's about $1000-2000 per American taxpayer. Of course, that doesn't count the cost of taking that money out of the civilian economy, which had better things to do with it. If they'd really wanted to take out Saddam because he was a mean nasty ugly guy, a Mossad hit squad could have probably done it for $5-10M, and the CIA could have probably done it for well under a billion, without the need to kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians or risk the lives of large numbers of US soldiers.
I checked with the author, and he confirms that it does just mean they're proposing to add a new 12-euro tax. Of course, there's still the problem of deciding whether the tax applies when you buy the CPU, or the motherboard, or the CD-writer, or the audio card, or some complete package deal, because it would be excessively annoying to have to pay the tax more than once for the same computer merely because you were upgrading components.
The place has been brewing the same black beer for about 600 years. I suspect the tables are newer, and the building's probably been extended a bit, but the continuity of the business has let it stick around. (On the other hand, in the newer parts of Prague had lots of concrete building that was being gutted and renovated, presumably either Soviet-era construction or at least Soviet-quality maintenance.)
We visited Bradford-on-Avon when I was a kid. The local tourist kiosk recommended that "you should go see the new church - it's Norman"... The old one was also interesting.
A couple of decades ago I was in the Middle East, and later in Greece. Individual Bedouin tents don't last forever, but neither do the mortgages on them... But Jerusalem is in pretty good shape; things seem to last until construction or war moves it around. Most of it's built out of stone, not just because it's durable but because that's about all there was as the area became deforested. These days we think of the Parthenon as a ruin, but it was a relatively solid building until the mid-1800s when it was used as an ammunition storage building during the Greek/Turkish wars and exploded. Most of the monasteries in the Greek area were blown up during World War I because they made good fortresses.
The St. Catherine's monastery in Sinai is in great shape. It's from ~400 AD, and while the "Burning Bush" there is unlikely to be the one Moses actually saw, it's still been the official Bush for 1600 years or so. On the other hand, the hot water system at the hotel by the monastery also feels like the original ~400AD system, which is not what a hiker needs to find after coming down the mountain:-)
And the Anasazi pueblo areas in the US Southwest would mostly still be fine housing today except for the lack of water and plumbing and the inconvenience of building vertical driveways. We'll see if Arcosanti survives at imitating them...
Here in San Francisco, the term "Victorian" refers to houses that are usually built of wood, have a certain stylized set of shapes, and have lots of decorativeness in the design, often using some standard design patterns for the wood parts of the decoration and also for the paint. Usually they're 2-3 stories high, sometimes 4 on one side on hilly terrain. Back east they're sometimes built of brick instead, though that's not very common here in earthquake country.
Back when I lived in New Jersey in the 80s, my general opinion was that a house that was 50 years old would last for another 50, and a house that was 20 years old would last for another 20, and a house that was 100 years old would last for another 100 (though occasionally when we were house-hunting we'd see houses that were obviously 30 years old 29 years ago:-) I helped do a lot of renovation work on our church parsonage, which had some parts that were colonial, and a large part that was mid-1800s farmhouse, which had a lot of 9x4 beams, some of which had been termite-chewed to about 20% wood and 80% airspace.
My house there was built in 1931, had a wood frame, cedar siding, real plaster inside walls, real wood floors, cinder-block and concrete foundation, and ship-lap 1x12 floors in the attic - none of the cheap sheetrock or particle board that too many later houses had. On the other hand, the plumbing was getting kind of funky, and some of the parts weren't replacable because they changed design in the 40s, and the original electricity had been knob&tube, which had been replaced by metal conduit in the earlier replacement and romex in the later upgrades, and the phone wiring was several generations of weirdness. The heating system was a steam boiler radiator system, originally coal-fired but upgraded to oil-fired by putting a burner into the fire chamber of the coal boiler.
Some technologies are more extensible than others - building spaces into a house that can have stuff added helps a lot, so for instance forced-hot-air ducting that can later have air conditioning added or heat sources changed is convenient. Conduit for running wires through is more extensible than specific sets of wires which become obsolete more quickly. One- or two-story buildings with an attic and a basement or crawlspace are much easier to modify than three-story buildings or buildings with neither way to access all the rooms. Interior walls that aren't load-bearing are a lot easier to edit later than load-bearing walls.
The original hype was that it would use very low power and have very low cost, e.g. $5 to add Bluetooth capability to things, which would lead to everything using it (which of course you'd need to get the production volumes to get the price down...)
Low price hasn't happened yet - things like USB-to-Bluetooth frobs cost about $70, and while prices have come down a lot, most Bluetooth devices seem to cost about $50 more than non-Bluetooth. (The original headsets were more like $200, and most are down to ~$100 or so.) As far as low power goes, several of the headsets talk about ~4 hours talk time per charge, which is marginally acceptable.
Data speed is certainly a tradeoff - 750kbps is about enough for decent music audio, but way more than enough for cell-phone audio (I don't know the power tradeoffs for radio vs. CPU, but I'd guess that cellphone headsets get 64kbps uncompressed audio and let the cellphone do the CPU-intensive compression/decompression to get ~6.5-13.3kbps?) And of course things like keyboards and mice don't need any appreciably bitrate. But All this stuff is designed for driving peripherals, not for running disk drives, much less raw SVGA video on the thing - it's more likely to need some kind of X-Windows equivalent or Display Postscript or ASCII-plus-simple-pictures, where you're sending objects to the glasses, not bitmaps.
In the part of San Francisco where I used to work, half the people were walking down the street looking like they were talking to themselves because they were on their cellphone headsets. The other half really _were_ talking to themselves.
But, yes, appropriate user interfaces and applications have to be developed to avoid stupidity like that. Some of it may be applications for the camera to detect when you're about to bump into people...
You'd actually be a grid computing network with the other people walking down the street rather than a single-OS Beowulf cluster. But what applications make sense for that kind of environment - do you want to start seeing what everybody else is seeing, at least if somebody says "hey, look at this!", or doing the Apple Rendezvous automatic music-sharing downloads?
Most of that probably takes more than Bluetooth for range and speed; it's only ~750kbps, presumably less if lots of people are trying to talk to you, but that just says you run WiFi on the larger module in your jacket pocket.
That earpiece looked nice and small compared to other bluetooth ones. The early ones had big clunky booms on them like the Plantronics and Ericsson ones. SoundID has one that's a bit smaller - still looks a bit obtrusive, but it's got adaptive noise cancellation and personalized hearing tuning, which may make it worthwhile.
The best-looking one I've seen is from Jabra - the pictures look a bit clunky, but in practice it wraps neatly around your ear, looking like somewhat spacy jewelry (it made my friend who had it looked a bit like she was one of the Borg, though:-)
Slashdot Mirror
So email wasn't originally just an SMTP-over-TCP/IP thing. There were many different protocols for email, some of them less incompatible with each other than others were, and getting just about anywhere required relays of some sort. A couple of the bigger parts of the world were the Arpanet (which was small then, and only defense contractors and some universities were allowed on), and UUCP (the Unix file copy program that Unix mail often used, and which used relays as its inherent way to do anything), and Netnews / Usenet, and BITnet (which ran on evil IBM EBCDIC systems), and CSNET and Phonenet and Fidonet and X.25.
"Unix-to-Unix Copy Program," said PDP-1. "You will never find a more wretched hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious."
Mostly relays were open, except for connecting to expensive services where you might want to limit who could run up your phone bill. Eventually the Honey DanBer version of UUCP changed the default behaviour to only accept incoming UUCP requests from systems that you knew how to connect back to (which made it possible for bouncegrams to be reliable) and made fanatically reliable bouncegram support available. But basically, sendmail emerged as the popular program to relay mail as well as delivering it, and relaying was of course open by default because that let you have more ways to deliver mail, and meant that you didn't have to write eleventeen different protocol-specific methods for _closing_ relay capability to unauthorized users. And they didn't need to be closed, because social pressure pretty much prevented spamming for a long time, even in parts of the network that weren't subject to the ARPANET Acceptable Use Policy of non-commerciality and/or official business only.
Why did they stay open when spammer relay abuse started becoming a problem? Partly because it took a while for MAPS to start bullying big ISPs into closing their relays, partly because there are millions of small systems with people who don't know detailed email system administration (Did you know that you can write a Turing Machine in sendmail.cf?), and partly because there's lots of broken software that nobody's really maintaining carefully. At least current versions of sendmail and other popular Unix mailers come with relays closed by default.
But some of us miss the old days, when the Net was more of a community, and running open relays was the neighborly thing to do, rather than an attractive nuisance that will be abused if discovered.
But usually this doesn't happen if all you've got is a subdomain from an email provider, and if everybody had unlimited user names inside their own subdomain instead of the more common conventions, dictionary attacks would scale very badly for spammers, especially if attempts to reach bad addresses led to long or increasing delays in responding.
Talk
- DARPA project, some good stuff.
Speech text, 1998
www.digitalearth.gov website
CNN article on the satellite version
NASA Triana Funding in Doubt
Triana built, mothballed waiting potential future launch
I suspect this was probably discussed in Slashdot back in the day, but couldn't get the search engines to give me a good reference.
He's correct.
Good grief - the BBC is the usually-well-behaved British Government radio/TV network. Like the US's Nationalist Public Radio, it has some independence and _lots_ of professionalism, but it knows who it works for, and the British government has pretty much been toadying for the US since Reagan and Iron Maggie. Just because they're not rabid Bush syncophants like Fox News or because they also play coverage of Parliamentary debates (which do have a wide range of opinions with much better ranting than most US Congress debate) doesn't mean they're Traitors to America like the French are (oh, wait, both Britain and France are supposed to be independent countries :-)
Sun's NeWS network extensible windowing system was a Postscript-based window system in ~1987 that was much more flexible than X about what objects lived where, and what you saw on the screen really was what you got on paper. OK, it was written in Postscript, debugging was marginal at best, crashing was ugly and undebuggable, and security was non-existent (:-), but Gosling who wrote it was able to carry over many of the lessons to Java.
Display Postscript, which the NeXT folks picked up, wasn't quite as powerful, but most programmers who used the stuff raved about it, and being Postscript-based it looked really nice. How much of that is still there in OSX?
So Gilmore and his crew have been giving out lights for a couple of years that with stickers saying "Linux Freeswan.org" on them, originally in colors and later in white LED when that came out. By now they'd like you to buy your own Photon lights (:-), but in the crypto-geek community they're fairly common keychain accessories. Aside from using them as blinky-light toys, I've found them useful for looking inside and under things, repairing cars in the dark, etc., and the keychain size means I've always got one with me.
Declaring war and waging war are much different issues - declaring war is a policy question, and that's Congress's responsibility. As Commander in Chief, yes, the President is better positioned to know militarily how to send the right soldiers to the right places to kill the enemies that Congress wants killed, but it's Congress's job to decide who those enemies are and whether to kill them or negotiate with them, which is NOT a military decision. It can be _influenced_ by military decisions (if the head of the Army says we're not strong enough to kill Enemy A, and they're not currently invading us, Congress should probably decide not to try to kill them.)
Under the more obvious understandings of what regulation of interstate commerce meant, the Federal government could have banned alcohol transportation between states, but couldn't ban alcohol manufacture or possession outright, or force uncooperative states to ban it, so the Prohibitionist politicians couldn't achieve the Total World Domination they wanted. They probably could have gotten liquor banned in most of the country for a while, but they probably couldn't have gotten it banned everywhere, or as totally as they wanted (e.g. Demon Rum vs. less-demonic beer), and state lawmakers that banned it when that was popular could later unban it any time 51% of them wanted their booze back. The Amendment gave them the power to make the ban "permanent" and enforce it on everybody.
During the 1930s, the Feds discovered that they could essentially ban things by using excise taxes - first there was the $200 tax on machine guns, which could be 6-12 months' wages for a laborer, and then the Marihuana taxes which were also nearly prohibitionary (but easily evaded), and then the obvious idea that the Feds wouldn't collect the tax or issue receipt stamps, so even if you wanted to pay their extortion you couldn't. And then Roosevelt's takeover of the economy and packing of the Supreme Court let the Feds get away with cases like forbidding a farmer to grow grain on his own land to feed to his own hogs because he'd have otherwise bought that grain on the open market, which is potentially interstate commerce - if you read the Federal drug laws (I think it's Title 10), they start off by asserting that it's difficult to tell where a given batch of drugs comes from, and therefore whether they're involved in Interstate Commerce, and therefore Congress was presuming jurisdiction over all of them. (By the way, that might be a trick that states or cities that want to provide medical marijuana can exploit.)
And since then the Feds have discovered that they can force states to do almost anything using leverage like cutting off all highway funds or other kinds of revenue-sharing if they don't follow the Feds' orders on a wide variety of topics such as requiring drivers' licenses records to collect Social Security Numbers.
It'll be a long hard climb out of this hole we're in.
Bush and his friends in the Florida government tried very hard to delay the process to get past the deadline, and succeeded in changing the rules several times during the process, and Gore and the Democrats were not competent enough to play the game successfully and beat them (or to figure out which counties the _real_ cheating was happening it, which apparently were some areas that the press didn't notice.) The fact that the Supremes are in charge of deciding who won, and did so, is separate from the fact that Bush was *trying* to prevent the votes from being counted accurately, which he shouldn't have done, and preventing the votes from being counted after the fact by the press, which was even more important, and of course there's the problem that the voter registration system had serious problems, incorrectly disenfranchising a large number of Floridians who would primarily have voted Democrat.
Furthermore, just because they've pledged their lives to support our freedoms doesn't relieve them of the individual responsibility to do the right thing - not only is that straightforward moral principle, it's US law: the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires US soldiers to disobey illegal orders, and that doesn't mean they can depend on their superior officers to tell them what's legal - those rules are there because of the Nurnberg "I vas only following orders" defenses, and the importance of them was reinforced by events like the My Lai massacre of unarmed civilians in Vietnam.
Furthermore, under the US Constitution, Congress is supposed to be in charge of deciding whether to have a war, and the President is only in charge of getting the job done once they've told him what to do, just as they're also responsible for setting foreign policy, which the Executive Branch is in charge of implementing. They've wimped out and let the last few Presidents walk all over them, and Bush should be roundly criticized for continuing this tradition, which of course he has largely gotten away with because of 9/11.
Separately from the immorality of Bush's actions, there's the problem that he *is* increasing the chances of terrorists attacking the US territory, and attacking Americans overseas, and attacking our allies such as Israel, because he's increasing the number of people who are severely pissed off at the US, like the bunch of Saudis who did the 9/11 atrocities, and by using them to provide military aid and training to other civilian-oppressing militaries around the world (like the Indonesians, and many of the Latin American tyrannies over the years), he's doing more of this.
In particular, respecting the office includes respecting the process of Getting Elected To It, and in my opinion, delaying and preventing recounts of the votes through any procedural tricks possible, which the Florida Republicans did, and taking it to the Supreme Court to prevent a recount, doesn't strike me as respecting that process. (That doesn't mean that the Democrats didn't incompetently botch their part of that job - they did. It also doesn't mean that they wouldn't have stolen it if they could - they've had some small experience with that in the past... Or that having his brother in charge of the gross mismanagement of elections didn't make the situation look worse than it was.)
Some of those systems were put in place to discourage development and widespread deployment of DGPS systems, and to retain some government centralized countrol of the technology. If there's ever a major ICBM attack on the US, you can bet that those things will be turned off right away, and any planes that were depending on them are going to have to land the old-fashioned way.
If you're trying to nuke civilians, sure, what's an extra 100 meters when you're trying to punish somebody for having Weapons of Mass Destruction. But the real concern with GPS accuracy has been pre-emptive ICBM strikes taking out missile silos, and there it matters quite a lot whether you're hitting the hardened silo on the lid or 100 meters away.
The early news discussions were predicting the war would cost about $200 billion. That's about $1000-2000 per American taxpayer. Of course, that doesn't count the cost of taking that money out of the civilian economy, which had better things to do with it. If they'd really wanted to take out Saddam because he was a mean nasty ugly guy, a Mossad hit squad could have probably done it for $5-10M, and the CIA could have probably done it for well under a billion, without the need to kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians or risk the lives of large numbers of US soldiers.
I checked with the author, and he confirms that it does just mean they're proposing to add a new 12-euro tax. Of course, there's still the problem of deciding whether the tax applies when you buy the CPU, or the motherboard, or the CD-writer, or the audio card, or some complete package deal, because it would be excessively annoying to have to pay the tax more than once for the same computer merely because you were upgrading components.
The place has been brewing the same black beer for about 600 years. I suspect the tables are newer, and the building's probably been extended a bit, but the continuity of the business has let it stick around. (On the other hand, in the newer parts of Prague had lots of concrete building that was being gutted and renovated, presumably either Soviet-era construction or at least Soviet-quality maintenance.)
We visited Bradford-on-Avon when I was a kid. The local tourist kiosk recommended that "you should go see the new church - it's Norman"... The old one was also interesting.
The St. Catherine's monastery in Sinai is in great shape. It's from ~400 AD, and while the "Burning Bush" there is unlikely to be the one Moses actually saw, it's still been the official Bush for 1600 years or so. On the other hand, the hot water system at the hotel by the monastery also feels like the original ~400AD system, which is not what a hiker needs to find after coming down the mountain :-)
And the Anasazi pueblo areas in the US Southwest would mostly still be fine housing today except for the lack of water and plumbing and the inconvenience of building vertical driveways. We'll see if Arcosanti survives at imitating them...
Back when I lived in New Jersey in the 80s, my general opinion was that a house that was 50 years old would last for another 50, and a house that was 20 years old would last for another 20, and a house that was 100 years old would last for another 100 (though occasionally when we were house-hunting we'd see houses that were obviously 30 years old 29 years ago :-) I helped do a lot of renovation work on our church parsonage, which had some parts that were colonial, and a large part that was mid-1800s farmhouse, which had a lot of 9x4 beams, some of which had been termite-chewed to about 20% wood and 80% airspace.
My house there was built in 1931, had a wood frame, cedar siding, real plaster inside walls, real wood floors, cinder-block and concrete foundation, and ship-lap 1x12 floors in the attic - none of the cheap sheetrock or particle board that too many later houses had. On the other hand, the plumbing was getting kind of funky, and some of the parts weren't replacable because they changed design in the 40s, and the original electricity had been knob&tube, which had been replaced by metal conduit in the earlier replacement and romex in the later upgrades, and the phone wiring was several generations of weirdness. The heating system was a steam boiler radiator system, originally coal-fired but upgraded to oil-fired by putting a burner into the fire chamber of the coal boiler.
Some technologies are more extensible than others - building spaces into a house that can have stuff added helps a lot, so for instance forced-hot-air ducting that can later have air conditioning added or heat sources changed is convenient. Conduit for running wires through is more extensible than specific sets of wires which become obsolete more quickly. One- or two-story buildings with an attic and a basement or crawlspace are much easier to modify than three-story buildings or buildings with neither way to access all the rooms. Interior walls that aren't load-bearing are a lot easier to edit later than load-bearing walls.
Low price hasn't happened yet - things like USB-to-Bluetooth frobs cost about $70, and while prices have come down a lot, most Bluetooth devices seem to cost about $50 more than non-Bluetooth. (The original headsets were more like $200, and most are down to ~$100 or so.) As far as low power goes, several of the headsets talk about ~4 hours talk time per charge, which is marginally acceptable.
Data speed is certainly a tradeoff - 750kbps is about enough for decent music audio, but way more than enough for cell-phone audio (I don't know the power tradeoffs for radio vs. CPU, but I'd guess that cellphone headsets get 64kbps uncompressed audio and let the cellphone do the CPU-intensive compression/decompression to get ~6.5-13.3kbps?) And of course things like keyboards and mice don't need any appreciably bitrate. But
All this stuff is designed for driving peripherals, not for running disk drives, much less raw SVGA video on the thing - it's more likely to need some kind of X-Windows equivalent or Display Postscript or ASCII-plus-simple-pictures, where you're sending objects to the glasses, not bitmaps.
But, yes, appropriate user interfaces and applications have to be developed to avoid stupidity like that. Some of it may be applications for the camera to detect when you're about to bump into people...
Most of that probably takes more than Bluetooth for range and speed; it's only ~750kbps, presumably less if lots of people are trying to talk to you, but that just says you run WiFi on the larger module in your jacket pocket.
The best-looking one I've seen is from Jabra - the pictures look a bit clunky, but in practice it wraps neatly around your ear, looking like somewhat spacy jewelry (it made my friend who had it looked a bit like she was one of the Borg, though :-)