I keep wondering why it's the federal government's job to build levies in NO, a city. Nevertheless, it would have taken a whole hell of a lot more money than what was asked for by *anybody* to get the levies category-4-hurricane-ready....because the Mississippi River is a "navigable waterway" (i.e, it has commercial shipping on it), which means it falls under the USCOE's jurisdiction to maintain the navigability of that waterway, which the levees provide (the flood control is a side issue) in order to more predictably control the Mississippi's flow, so those are USCOE levees, even the ones holding Lake Ponchatrain out of NO.
In other areas with large rivers but are not navigable, the states and municipalities work to maintain the levees. My experiences with that are in NW Washington (Skagit, Nooksack, etc), where the lower parts of those rivers are behind levees that are built and maintained by the state and county, not the USCOE. USCOE maintains levees on the Columbia and Snake Rivers where the barges go.
At least in Florida, it seemed like Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency *BEFORE* Katrina hit. Did they do that in MS, LA and AL? If they did, it didn't make the press.
deploy the guard to ensure strikes are averted (for the national good) ...already happened several times. Depending on how loose your definition of "strike" is, I'd say that the last times were either deployment of Guard and Army Reserve (remember, those are federal not state troops) in various places in the South to enforce court rulings against segregation of public institutions...
Then there are the anti-war riots during the 60's and 70's that were in part broken up by soldiers along side civilian cops...
But better examples are various large strikes that were put down by US soldiers in coal, railroad and steel industries.
Actually... *OTHERS* decide what "strength" to build something and how much they will spend to get it, at least in civil engineering (whether the "others" are politicians or your own company deciding its expected profit margin for the project).
You put in your conservative fudge factor of course in order to exceed that strength factor while coming in at or under budget.
If you think that you might be able to spend 10% more which will net you 20% more baseline strength (and maybe 30% more failure capacity) due to your clever engineering analysis, you might try to push up the line for it, but you then run the risk of pointing out that the same trick might be used to reduce the specified strength (but with your fudge factor meet it), saving the politicians 15% in costs (or netting your company 5% more profit).
It's all trade-offs.
The USCOE has a budget, and still seems to take its missions and roles somewhat seriously, because it realizes it does have a responsibility if the things it has put in place stop working. But the politicians and bureaucrats (fed, state, local) have a hand in the budgets and priorities to the USCOE, like any other government entitity.
If Congressman Schlep wants/needs $5 million projects to go to his highway construction buddies, and they come from the district's levee and river navigation budgets, too bad.
Which is too bad, because you'd maybe think that all those petrochemical and shipping companies might want to lobby stronger FOR keeping the levees in good shape, if only to look after the economics of having a good chunk of their labor dependent on those levees, as well as perhaps provide a better chance that any infrastructures will come out undamaged (i.e., I-10) as well.
While in the short range of the area affected by the hurricane, the hurricane releases a tremendous amount of energy. What will happen OVERALL if that energy is NOT allowed to be released?
And, why is it that tropical areas (except for places like Bangladesh) seem to deal with much stronger hurricanes...er, typhoons, with less apparant fanfare, than the US? Maybe because they end up being like really strong out-of-season monsoons?
Go ahead, asia countries, do a little superiority dance. And, yes, I'm aware that the topography of the SE united states isn't quite the same as most of the relatively non-flat SE asian islands and coastal areas...
The terrorists are bullies. They want power as much as Ashcroft wanted it.
Getting 300 million people to change their lives will provide a measure of satisfaction, which then fuels the need to make even more or bigger actions.
It's part of human nature.
Take any single-issue demagogue. They plod along, and eventually win some sort of concession or whatnot about their pet issue. They're quiet for awhile. But eventually, they will find another issue, and the better ones try to tie the past issue into the new issue, as an overarching "movement" that didn't exist before, but does now.
Pat Robertson. Jesse Jackson. Tim Eyman. Prop 37 advocates (real issue is getting rid of Oregon land use laws). Anti-Logging activists (who still need to use toilet paper to wipe their butts) PATRIOT ACT sponsors and beneficiaries. They don't stop when they've "won", because "they've only just begun". IN other words, they don't know when or how to stop.
Indeed, it's the terrorists that are playing into the hands of the fascists. Indeed, at some point they become each other.
Another question is why Franklin would believe that the willingness to give up some of one's own essential liberty merits a loss of safety. Did he really mean that people who would feel safer with a constant overbearing police presence should instead be thrown to the wolves (rather, to the criminal elements they want the police to protect them from)? Isn't safety itself an essential liberty?
Cuba is amazingly free of crime. But at what cost? For one, it is entirely possible to make an anonymous call to the police about the zit on your neighbor's nose, and how disgusting it is (but you'd probably say, "I think he is tricking the neighborhood kids with candy and fondling them behind the bushes"), the police show up at his house at 4am and take him away to Room 109. That ever-present THREAT really does a lot to stifle criminal activity, and a whole bunch of other activity that would seem normal anywhere else.
I really don't think too many people would call Cuba a very freedom-inspiring place to live, either.
ON a more local level, some of us live in condominiums or home developments where a few people in charge of the condo or home owners' board are VERY active and intrusive at enforcing whatever association agreement is in place, but often times it is capriciously applied, often times in a very uneven manner. Piss off one of these members, and suddenly they are threatening you with violating something or another, and you have 30 days to correct it before you're evicted. Usually it's "affecting others' property values", etc. Yeah, a problem if everyone's homes are for sale. And don't then bitch when your property's value is reassessed and your taxes go up!
So much for the joys of home ownership. "if you don't like it, then move!"
Yep, while failing to mention really what it is like to go into a typical Las Vegas casino. If they don't like you, they can kick you out, then they tell the other casinos, and they will not let you in, either.
The casinos in Nevada are a quasi-government of their own.
Re: lots of guns......but I don't want to own a gun to feel safe to walk on my streets, because the backside of that is if you're walking around without a gun, you are up to no good or are an outsider, to be feared.
It's like flipping off or honking at an asshat who cuts you off on the highway.
Something is so completely fucked up on a basic societal level when we now live in fear at openly displaying or stating disgust at what someone else has done around us because they might "road rage" on us or beat the shit out of us (i.e., guy in pizza parlor who displayed his disapproval when a woman cut in front of the line, and her boyfriend came back in and beat the shit out of him). Then the cops say, "well, you shouldn't have provoked him", like it is now YOUR FUCKING FAULT for invoking the wrath of the asshole on you.
Or... instead of understanding the "mathematics" behind languages, realizing that msot of them in common use are based off of a common syntactic metamodel (i.e., basic, c/C++/Java/C#, fortrash, pascal, etc) makes it a lot easier. All of these languages have basically the same syntactic constructs and conventions: functions/subs/procedures, variable definitions, if-then-else, for-next, do-while, answer=value-op-value algebra (left-to-right order), etc.
Now, throw a C/C++/Java programmer at Prolog, Lisp, or a functional language (Haskel, OCAML, etc) or a stack language (BF, Forth, PostScript, etc)...
The Univ. of Washington used several printers like this as well. One was in the Academic Computing Center. Why? Well, many researchers like having hardcopy of their datasets. So, you schedule your job, supply a budget number to charge it, and run it. In the time it would take you to walk down there from the Physics or Oceanography buildings, your 2-ream print job is probably sitting in the cubbyhole for you to get.
The main one used there was a Xerox printer, and it was also the preferred printer for printing out things like manuals, etc. It did just fine printing PS at 60 ppm as it did DVI or text.
The main IT center up north had at least two also, which were used to print invoices, student billing, grades, etc. They had very little downtime...
I think Health Sciences/UWMC had their own IBM 3800 printer as well.
This is 1991-era memory, though. I'm sure it is much different now, except that the Burroughs A10/A15 mainframes are probably still in use.
Hmm... no, the Windows Update ActiveX control is used to ensure that only IE is used to access Windows Update. The ActiveX control is able to exceed user's security privileges to provide back certain system information that might not otherwise be possible to do otherwise for a given user.
it would have been very bad if ActiveX had been a standard repertoire
Well, MS *did* want it to be the way to do what Flash does now, because it wasn't as limited compared to downloaded Java controls. But I'm going to guess that it's far easier to do 80% of what Flash does in Flash, and the other 20% is equally as complex as ActiveX, with the benefit that the Flash stuff will work on Macs, Windows, etc. (as does the development environment...).
You don't even need to say that -- it's it copyright by default, but not open source by default.
Whether the license on the copyrighted JavaScript says it's "open source" or not, if you can access and read the JavaScript code, it's out there in the open for all eyeballs to look at and discuss. Whether I can find a security hole or not or whether the code is obfuscated to hell or not is not really germane, nor is whether the authors know or not if the code has security holes in it, because there is probably someone crazy enough to "deobfuscate it" (i.e., like crackers, etc., who are patient enough using tools like disassemblers, hex editors and SoftICE to break SecureROM for NOCD cracks) and make sense of it, especially if the code promises some interesting techniques to be had (like Google Maps).
Please don't make the Raymondesque argument that open source code doesn't have security holes because everyone can read it, unless you personally read all the code you download before you run it yourself
Again, I should go green salmon fishing with this can of red herring. It is far easier for SOMEONE (whether it is me, you or the geek who never leaves his grandmother's basement with the OC-3 connection to the house...) to look at the source and simulate whether there is any weaknesses in it. It's obviously easy enough to do already with complex executables and libraries without access to any form of source code.
If it's open sourced, getting any changes back into the stream are far easier than if they're discovered in closed source, especially if the vendor regards 3rd-party security discoveries with great disdain and mockery.
I think also that code signing has proven to not be as trustworthy as Microsoft has pimped it up in the past. I certainly do not regard it as "trustworthy". Accountability? Oh, please. What if the certificate was issued to some company in.IQ or some other country you've never heard about? It really is a false sense of security.
There is no way we will be able to replace the sheer magnitude of energy inputs provided by the Sun and geotechnical forces that have created our supplies of liquid and gas petroleum. Of course, everything *we* do will be energy negative compared to sucking crude oil and natural gas out of the ground.
In the grand scheme of things, all petroleum oil extraction schemes are energy-negative, if you factor in all the energy inputs that we traditionally disregard.
Like Germany in WWII (coal gasification -> diesel/gasoline process), once the easy stuff is limited, other systems become feasible or even profitable.
If we Americans could just take the simple steps of driving fuel-efficient cars,
Yes, driving oneself to work in a 6000-lb SUV does not make sense in most cases. But you can't haul a ton or two of hay with a Prius, either.
Making an old house "energy efficient" has lots of infrastructure-based dependencies. It is so nice having gas furnace and water heater, but if you live where natural gas pipelines are not in your neighborhood, human nature dictates that NO one is going to foot the bill to put the line in to their house, only to have all the neighbors downline suddenly take advantage of the mainline YOU paid to have laid down. The Gas Utility will make the first user pay for it all...
New homes, even the cheap ones, are FAR more energy efficient than an old farm house.
There are rates of return also to consider. It makes 0 sense to put in a 13-SEER air conditioner in a house in Seattle, compared to a 10 or 11 SEER one. Why? It's not used often enough to justify the energy savings over time vs the difference in cost between the two systems. Etc. There are still a huge number of homes in the NE United States that use heating oil furnaces, which absolutely suck from an energy efficiency perspective compared to electric (but electricity is probably most expensive there, too) or natural gas (no residential NG pipeline infrastructure).
Humanity as a whole only changes en masse when it has to, whether the tip of the bayonnet is actual or perceived (i.e., high gas and energy prices).
Isn't the main way to get many goods shipped in containers from China/SE Asia to Europe to ship them to the US, transload the containers to rail, train them across the US, and reload the containers back onto ships to send to Europe?
The main reason for this is that many if not most of the larger container ships now are too big to fit through the Panama and Suez Canals, and going around the Cape of Good Hope (ZAfrica) and Cape Horn (South America) just takes too long...
So how does exactly MySQL make Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft, etc., irrelevant for a company to buy into?
I've worked at a couple of smallish companies now that have been big into Oracle stuff. No, they're not even "top 1000" companies.
I don't think they're running these on $1M servers. But I wouldn't be suprised if the software, support and maintenance licenses didn't cost near that much.
So how is "all people have equal access to government facilities, including educational facilities", judicial activism? If anything, the legislatures and Congress deserved to be bitch-slapped for the long history of passing assinine laws keeping one group of Americans at a distinct disadvantage, which only reinforced their cultural and social disadvantage (to which some do argue that they still buy in to).
How is, a Woman should not be a slave to what is inside her body? Would a husband be allowed to get the Court to keep his wife from getting a medical procedure (let's make it trivial, but improbable, say, a breast reduction surgery...) because it's the husband's primary domain over his wife, and she shouldn't be allowed to do it if he doesn't want it to happen?
OK, let's make it less black-and-white. Wife wants to die (she's terminally ill), but husband doesn't want to let her do it?
Mother has kid(s). Father is a sexual pervert. Mother decides the only way to protect the kids is to put them up for adoption (after court has removed father's rights), but Father decides he should still have some say.
If we invoke the slavery issue, why should a woman be held hostage for 9 months to bear a baby she may not want to bring into the world? Should the Government be allowed to force a person to do this?
Mandatory organ donorship is installed. All must register. Someone is having a baby, but it's screwed up, but it's all cool because the donor database decides that YOU are a perfect match, and, well, you should give up a perfectly good, redundant lung, kidney, an eye, a good chunk of your liver, and all sorts of other things, so that baby can live. So what if it destroys *YOUR* quality of life, your ability to earn a living (say you're a professional athlete, or have a very physical job like carpenter), etc., but a Baby got to live!
Actually, at least once (during the Restoration period after the US civil war), Congress has restricted the jurisdiction of the supreme court, in that case, to not be able to hear cases dealing with the Restoration actions of the Govment...
They began as business alliances that through their increasing wealth eventually brought into law their privelleged right to a monopoly on certain areas. Sounds familiar?
Ever look into the trades (i.e., plumber, electrician, carpenter, pipe fitter, etc.)? You may figure out how to do things on your own, but unless you go through the trade union's apprenticeship program, and work up to being a journeyman, good luck finding much work.
The Trade unions are modern guilds in the medieval sense of the word.
It's the true "Ownership" society. US becomes more like Mexico and other Latin America countries: a few rich entities own most of the business entities, own most of the land, etc.
Instead of a 30-yr mortgage, the next big real estate wave will be 50-yr leases on properties. Everyone will argue that the leases are "iron-clad" equivalent to actually owning the property, but they'll casually overlook or find a way to completely obfuscate terms like "can be terminated at any time by the lessor"...
another "cool" one will be home "ownership", where you may own the physical home, but not the property it sits on. Condos, townhomes, etc. are already like this, but look for it happening in residential single-family detached housing developments too. One way to pass this by everyone's radar screens will be shifting property tax burden from the real property side (the whole development will be taxed at some small rate), and shifting it instead to a "building tax". Buildings are not real property, btw...
Hmm... that one is a double-edged sword. The other way to look at it is it made the "family farm" doable. For most farming operations, there is a size of an operation that is required for it to be profitable.
At the time they came out, a 40 acre farm was a BIG operation. The tractor let a farmer (and his family) actually work that land on his own profitably.
My neighbor works about 1000 acres (most of it is leased) in the upper Willamette Valley, and wouldn't be able to do it without his several tractors, his $200K JD combine (imagine having a farm implement loan larger than your home mortgage...), etc.
Government subsidies? you make this sound like it's across the board.
Well, ask a sheep rancher, or someone who farms something besides sugar, tobacco, dairy or cotton, and it's most definitely not.
Hmm... my big govment subsidy? A whopping $78/yr for my 3.5 acres of "wheat" (it's now pasture for my sheep). 3.5 acres? Well, you have to start somewhere. Didn't have $500K burning a hole in my pocket to buy something bigger, either.
Yes, I seriously have thought about just framing the checks...
as I recall, it was one of the largest installations of Netware 4 at the time (which was fighting its losing battle with NT 4.0). It was written up in several of the tech rags (Infoworld, Computer Week, etc), sort of positively hopeful that it might work....
But, obviously, it became difficult to appease the passive-aggressive baggage handlers inside.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep wondering why it's the federal government's job to build levies in NO, a city. Nevertheless, it would have taken a whole hell of a lot more money than what was asked for by *anybody* to get the levies category-4-hurricane-ready. ...because the Mississippi River is a "navigable waterway" (i.e, it has commercial shipping on it), which means it falls under the USCOE's jurisdiction to maintain the navigability of that waterway, which the levees provide (the flood control is a side issue) in order to more predictably control the Mississippi's flow, so those are USCOE levees, even the ones holding Lake Ponchatrain out of NO.
In other areas with large rivers but are not navigable, the states and municipalities work to maintain the levees. My experiences with that are in NW Washington (Skagit, Nooksack, etc), where the lower parts of those rivers are behind levees that are built and maintained by the state and county, not the USCOE. USCOE maintains levees on the Columbia and Snake Rivers where the barges go.
At least in Florida, it seemed like Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency *BEFORE* Katrina hit. Did they do that in MS, LA and AL? If they did, it didn't make the press.
deploy the guard to ensure strikes are averted (for the national good) ...already happened several times. Depending on how loose your definition of "strike" is, I'd say that the last times were either deployment of Guard and Army Reserve (remember, those are federal not state troops) in various places in the South to enforce court rulings against segregation of public institutions...
Then there are the anti-war riots during the 60's and 70's that were in part broken up by soldiers along side civilian cops...
But better examples are various large strikes that were put down by US soldiers in coal, railroad and steel industries.
Actually... *OTHERS* decide what "strength" to build something and how much they will spend to get it, at least in civil engineering (whether the "others" are politicians or your own company deciding its expected profit margin for the project).
You put in your conservative fudge factor of course in order to exceed that strength factor while coming in at or under budget.
If you think that you might be able to spend 10% more which will net you 20% more baseline strength (and maybe 30% more failure capacity) due to your clever engineering analysis, you might try to push up the line for it, but you then run the risk of pointing out that the same trick might be used to reduce the specified strength (but with your fudge factor meet it), saving the politicians 15% in costs (or netting your company 5% more profit).
It's all trade-offs.
The USCOE has a budget, and still seems to take its missions and roles somewhat seriously, because it realizes it does have a responsibility if the things it has put in place stop working. But the politicians and bureaucrats (fed, state, local) have a hand in the budgets and priorities to the USCOE, like any other government entitity.
If Congressman Schlep wants/needs $5 million projects to go to his highway construction buddies, and they come from the district's levee and river navigation budgets, too bad.
Which is too bad, because you'd maybe think that all those petrochemical and shipping companies might want to lobby stronger FOR keeping the levees in good shape, if only to look after the economics of having a good chunk of their labor dependent on those levees, as well as perhaps provide a better chance that any infrastructures will come out undamaged (i.e., I-10) as well.
While in the short range of the area affected by the hurricane, the hurricane releases a tremendous amount of energy. What will happen OVERALL if that energy is NOT allowed to be released?
And, why is it that tropical areas (except for places like Bangladesh) seem to deal with much stronger hurricanes...er, typhoons, with less apparant fanfare, than the US? Maybe because they end up being like really strong out-of-season monsoons?
Go ahead, asia countries, do a little superiority dance. And, yes, I'm aware that the topography of the SE united states isn't quite the same as most of the relatively non-flat SE asian islands and coastal areas...
The terrorists are bullies. They want power as much as Ashcroft wanted it.
Getting 300 million people to change their lives will provide a measure of satisfaction, which then fuels the need to make even more or bigger actions.
It's part of human nature.
Take any single-issue demagogue. They plod along, and eventually win some sort of concession or whatnot about their pet issue. They're quiet for awhile. But eventually, they will find another issue, and the better ones try to tie the past issue into the new issue, as an overarching "movement" that didn't exist before, but does now.
Pat Robertson. Jesse Jackson. Tim Eyman. Prop 37 advocates (real issue is getting rid of Oregon land use laws). Anti-Logging activists (who still need to use toilet paper to wipe their butts) PATRIOT ACT sponsors and beneficiaries. They don't stop when they've "won", because "they've only just begun". IN other words, they don't know when or how to stop.
Indeed, it's the terrorists that are playing into the hands of the fascists.
Indeed, at some point they become each other.
Another question is why Franklin would believe that the willingness to give up some of one's own essential liberty merits a loss of safety. Did he really mean that people who would feel safer with a constant overbearing police presence should instead be thrown to the wolves (rather, to the criminal elements they want the police to protect them from)? Isn't safety itself an essential liberty?
Cuba is amazingly free of crime. But at what cost? For one, it is entirely possible to make an anonymous call to the police about the zit on your neighbor's nose, and how disgusting it is (but you'd probably say, "I think he is tricking the neighborhood kids with candy and fondling them behind the bushes"), the police show up at his house at 4am and take him away to Room 109. That ever-present THREAT really does a lot to stifle criminal activity, and a whole bunch of other activity that would seem normal anywhere else.
I really don't think too many people would call Cuba a very freedom-inspiring place to live, either.
ON a more local level, some of us live in condominiums or home developments where a few people in charge of the condo or home owners' board are VERY active and intrusive at enforcing whatever association agreement is in place, but often times it is capriciously applied, often times in a very uneven manner. Piss off one of these members, and suddenly they are threatening you with violating something or another, and you have 30 days to correct it before you're evicted.
Usually it's "affecting others' property values", etc. Yeah, a problem if everyone's homes are for sale. And don't then bitch when your property's value is reassessed and your taxes go up!
So much for the joys of home ownership. "if you don't like it, then move!"
Yep, while failing to mention really what it is like to go into a typical Las Vegas casino. If they don't like you, they can kick you out, then they tell the other casinos, and they will not let you in, either.
The casinos in Nevada are a quasi-government of their own.
Re: lots of guns... ...but I don't want to own a gun to feel safe to walk on my streets, because the backside of that is if you're walking around without a gun, you are up to no good or are an outsider, to be feared.
It's like flipping off or honking at an asshat who cuts you off on the highway.
Something is so completely fucked up on a basic societal level when we now live in fear at openly displaying or stating disgust at what someone else has done around us because they might "road rage" on us or beat the shit out of us (i.e., guy in pizza parlor who displayed his disapproval when a woman cut in front of the line, and her boyfriend came back in and beat the shit out of him). Then the cops say, "well, you shouldn't have provoked him", like it is now YOUR FUCKING FAULT for invoking the wrath of the asshole on you.
Or... instead of understanding the "mathematics" behind languages, realizing that msot of them in common use are based off of a common syntactic metamodel (i.e., basic, c/C++/Java/C#, fortrash, pascal, etc) makes it a lot easier. All of these languages have basically the same syntactic constructs and conventions: functions/subs/procedures, variable definitions, if-then-else, for-next, do-while, answer=value-op-value algebra (left-to-right order), etc.
Now, throw a C/C++/Java programmer at Prolog, Lisp, or a functional language (Haskel, OCAML, etc) or a stack language (BF, Forth, PostScript, etc)...
The Univ. of Washington used several printers like this as well. One was in the Academic Computing Center. Why? Well, many researchers like having hardcopy of their datasets. So, you schedule your job, supply a budget number to charge it, and run it. In the time it would take you to walk down there from the Physics or Oceanography buildings, your 2-ream print job is probably sitting in the cubbyhole for you to get.
The main one used there was a Xerox printer, and it was also the preferred printer for printing out things like manuals, etc. It did just fine printing PS at 60 ppm as it did DVI or text.
The main IT center up north had at least two also, which were used to print invoices, student billing, grades, etc. They had very little downtime...
I think Health Sciences/UWMC had their own IBM 3800 printer as well.
This is 1991-era memory, though. I'm sure it is much different now, except that the Burroughs A10/A15 mainframes are probably still in use.
from the Metro URL: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/Device/print/metro.
All other rights are retained by Microsoft; this Agreement does not give You rights under any Microsoft patents.
Hmm... nice and open, yeah.
Hmm... no, the Windows Update ActiveX control is used to ensure that only IE is used to access Windows Update. The ActiveX control is able to exceed user's security privileges to provide back certain system information that might not otherwise be possible to do otherwise for a given user.
it would have been very bad if ActiveX had been a standard repertoire
Well, MS *did* want it to be the way to do what Flash does now, because it wasn't as limited compared to downloaded Java controls. But I'm going to guess that it's far easier to do 80% of what Flash does in Flash, and the other 20% is equally as complex as ActiveX, with the benefit that the Flash stuff will work on Macs, Windows, etc. (as does the development environment...).
You don't even need to say that -- it's it copyright by default, but not open source by default.
.IQ or some other country you've never heard about? It really is a false sense of security.
Whether the license on the copyrighted JavaScript says it's "open source" or not, if you can access and read the JavaScript code, it's out there in the open for all eyeballs to look at and discuss. Whether I can find a security hole or not or whether the code is obfuscated to hell or not is not really germane, nor is whether the authors know or not if the code has security holes in it, because there is probably someone crazy enough to "deobfuscate it" (i.e., like crackers, etc., who are patient enough using tools like disassemblers, hex editors and SoftICE to break SecureROM for NOCD cracks) and make sense of it, especially if the code promises some interesting techniques to be had (like Google Maps).
Please don't make the Raymondesque argument that open source code doesn't have security holes because everyone can read it, unless you personally read all the code you download before you run it yourself
Again, I should go green salmon fishing with this can of red herring. It is far easier for SOMEONE (whether it is me, you or the geek who never leaves his grandmother's basement with the OC-3 connection to the house...) to look at the source and simulate whether there is any weaknesses in it. It's obviously easy enough to do already with complex executables and libraries without access to any form of source code.
If it's open sourced, getting any changes back into the stream are far easier than if they're discovered in closed source, especially if the vendor regards 3rd-party security discoveries with great disdain and mockery.
I think also that code signing has proven to not be as trustworthy as Microsoft has pimped it up in the past. I certainly do not regard it as "trustworthy". Accountability? Oh, please. What if the certificate was issued to some company in
There is no way we will be able to replace the sheer magnitude of energy inputs provided by the Sun and geotechnical forces that have created our supplies of liquid and gas petroleum. Of course, everything *we* do will be energy negative compared to sucking crude oil and natural gas out of the ground.
In the grand scheme of things, all petroleum oil extraction schemes are energy-negative, if you factor in all the energy inputs that we traditionally disregard.
Like Germany in WWII (coal gasification -> diesel/gasoline process), once the easy stuff is limited, other systems become feasible or even profitable.
If we Americans could just take the simple steps of driving fuel-efficient cars,
Yes, driving oneself to work in a 6000-lb SUV does not make sense in most cases. But you can't haul a ton or two of hay with a Prius, either.
Making an old house "energy efficient" has lots of infrastructure-based dependencies. It is so nice having gas furnace and water heater, but if you live where natural gas pipelines are not in your neighborhood, human nature dictates that NO one is going to foot the bill to put the line in to their house, only to have all the neighbors downline suddenly take advantage of the mainline YOU paid to have laid down. The Gas Utility will make the first user pay for it all...
New homes, even the cheap ones, are FAR more energy efficient than an old farm house.
There are rates of return also to consider. It makes 0 sense to put in a 13-SEER air conditioner in a house in Seattle, compared to a 10 or 11 SEER one. Why? It's not used often enough to justify the energy savings over time vs the difference in cost between the two systems. Etc.
There are still a huge number of homes in the NE United States that use heating oil furnaces, which absolutely suck from an energy efficiency perspective compared to electric (but electricity is probably most expensive there, too) or natural gas (no residential NG pipeline infrastructure).
Humanity as a whole only changes en masse when it has to, whether the tip of the bayonnet is actual or perceived (i.e., high gas and energy prices).
Isn't the main way to get many goods shipped in containers from China/SE Asia to Europe to ship them to the US, transload the containers to rail, train them across the US, and reload the containers back onto ships to send to Europe?
The main reason for this is that many if not most of the larger container ships now are too big to fit through the Panama and Suez Canals, and going around the Cape of Good Hope (ZAfrica) and Cape Horn (South America) just takes too long...
So how does exactly MySQL make Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft, etc., irrelevant for a company to buy into?
I've worked at a couple of smallish companies now that have been big into Oracle stuff. No, they're not even "top 1000" companies.
I don't think they're running these on $1M servers. But I wouldn't be suprised if the software, support and maintenance licenses didn't cost near that much.
So how is "all people have equal access to government facilities, including educational facilities", judicial activism? If anything, the legislatures and Congress deserved to be bitch-slapped for the long history of passing assinine laws keeping one group of Americans at a distinct disadvantage, which only reinforced their cultural and social disadvantage (to which some do argue that they still buy in to).
How is, a Woman should not be a slave to what is inside her body? Would a husband be allowed to get the Court to keep his wife from getting a medical procedure (let's make it trivial, but improbable, say, a breast reduction surgery...) because it's the husband's primary domain over his wife, and she shouldn't be allowed to do it if he doesn't want it to happen?
OK, let's make it less black-and-white. Wife wants to die (she's terminally ill), but husband doesn't want to let her do it?
Mother has kid(s). Father is a sexual pervert. Mother decides the only way to protect the kids is to put them up for adoption (after court has removed father's rights), but Father decides he should still have some say.
If we invoke the slavery issue, why should a woman be held hostage for 9 months to bear a baby she may not want to bring into the world? Should the Government be allowed to force a person to do this?
Mandatory organ donorship is installed. All must register. Someone is having a baby, but it's screwed up, but it's all cool because the donor database decides that YOU are a perfect match, and, well, you should give up a perfectly good, redundant lung, kidney, an eye, a good chunk of your liver, and all sorts of other things, so that baby can live. So what if it destroys *YOUR* quality of life, your ability to earn a living (say you're a professional athlete, or have a very physical job like carpenter), etc., but a Baby got to live!
Would you be all cool about it then?
Actually, at least once (during the Restoration period after the US civil war), Congress has restricted the jurisdiction of the supreme court, in that case, to not be able to hear cases dealing with the Restoration actions of the Govment...
CoLinux works quite well, actually.
They began as business alliances that through their increasing wealth eventually brought into law their privelleged right to a monopoly on certain areas. Sounds familiar?
Ever look into the trades (i.e., plumber, electrician, carpenter, pipe fitter, etc.)? You may figure out how to do things on your own, but unless you go through the trade union's apprenticeship program, and work up to being a journeyman, good luck finding much work.
The Trade unions are modern guilds in the medieval sense of the word.
It's the true "Ownership" society. US becomes more like Mexico and other Latin America countries: a few rich entities own most of the business entities, own most of the land, etc.
Instead of a 30-yr mortgage, the next big real estate wave will be 50-yr leases on properties. Everyone will argue that the leases are "iron-clad" equivalent to actually owning the property, but they'll casually overlook or find a way to completely obfuscate terms like "can be terminated at any time by the lessor"...
another "cool" one will be home "ownership", where you may own the physical home, but not the property it sits on. Condos, townhomes, etc. are already like this, but look for it happening in residential single-family detached housing developments too. One way to pass this by everyone's radar screens will be shifting property tax burden from the real property side (the whole development will be taxed at some small rate), and shifting it instead to a "building tax". Buildings are not real property, btw...
Hmm... that one is a double-edged sword. The other way to look at it is it made the "family farm" doable. For most farming operations, there is a size of an operation that is required for it to be profitable.
At the time they came out, a 40 acre farm was a BIG operation. The tractor let a farmer (and his family) actually work that land on his own profitably.
My neighbor works about 1000 acres (most of it is leased) in the upper Willamette Valley, and wouldn't be able to do it without his several tractors, his $200K JD combine (imagine having a farm implement loan larger than your home mortgage...), etc.
Government subsidies? you make this sound like it's across the board.
Well, ask a sheep rancher, or someone who farms something besides sugar, tobacco, dairy or cotton, and it's most definitely not.
Hmm... my big govment subsidy? A whopping $78/yr for my 3.5 acres of "wheat" (it's now pasture for my sheep). 3.5 acres? Well, you have to start somewhere. Didn't have $500K burning a hole in my pocket to buy something bigger, either.
Yes, I seriously have thought about just framing the checks...
as I recall, it was one of the largest installations of Netware 4 at the time (which was fighting its losing battle with NT 4.0). It was written up in several of the tech rags (Infoworld, Computer Week, etc), sort of positively hopeful that it might work....
But, obviously, it became difficult to appease the passive-aggressive baggage handlers inside.
No, give it to methamphetamine addicts (or sell it to meth addicts) to help them keep from getting psychotic from prolonged sleep deprivation...
Imagine HOPE or DEFCON with 5-day straight hacking sessions with their special "mountain dew".