So when a religious person and an atheist meet and say something like "I find your views completely ridiculous" at the same time to each other then the religious person can sue the atheist but not vice versa?
This is not so much in reply to your comment as the comic you linked to...
As an athiest, I would give anything to have Christians or followers of other religions come up to me and say, "I find your views completely ridiculous and here's why." It would show me that they are at least evaluating their own views (in comparison to mine, granted) instead of just running around spewing out all the half-baked ideas that were preached into them since they were 4 years old. Like so many people I've run into throughout my life.
All just sounding like somebody needs to grow the fuck up and realize that its a big world and not everyone is going to be duped into believing in some random set of myths about some god that you can't see, hear, touch, or taste, but assuredly, must exist.... and all the other mythological beings that you also can't see hear, touch, or taste must obviously not exist.
You're my hero. You sound just like Penn Jilette. (That's a compliment.)
Yet their all powerful god can't protect them from a small number of people who aren't even organized, and couldn't care less what silly crap they waste their time with. Yes, they have a very powerful god indeed.
This is what kills me the most about religious extremists. They don't stop to think, "wait a minute... my god is all-powerful and all-knowing... maybe he can figure out defend himself from people calling him names?"
I hate to be that bitter old pessimist, but this has been debated to death and back here on Slashdot many times over. I swear, it should be in the FAQ by now.
There is not one backup strategy that covers all situations, even if you think there ought to be.
You have to do the work to find one that fits your needs, or hire someone else to.
Cheap, easy, reliable. Choose any two.
Slashdot: Not your personal army.
All of the times this question has come up (feels like at least once a month), there have been many very good suggestions. Why should we rehash them for the nth time?
I believe that it's ethically wrong to decrypt a satellite data stream for the purpose of watching TV content that you didn't pay for. However, a person's right to research technology should always trump that. Everyone should have the right to receive, analyze, decrypt, and otherwise make use of any signal that makes use of public spectrum and makes its way onto the property that they own or the space that they legally inhabit. If the satellite (and other wireless content) providers don't want people to break their encryption, then they need to use encryption that can't be broken by amateurs. As the law currently stands, they could run their data stream through rot13 (or something almost as trivial) and still bring the DMCA down on everyone from satellite "pirates," to hobbyists, to people who forgot to renew their subscription.
The first few marketing seem to show it running Moblin, which is based on Linux and is 100% the perfect OS and interface for this style of computer.
But of course, the spec sheet lists Windows XP. And lately Asus has been totally putting out for Microsoft.
One of these days, I keep praying that OEMs will wise up to the fact that the importance of quality software is rapidly overtaking the importance of the quality of the hardware.
I mean a prototype of the final product. If you have good engineers, the circuit itself is not often terribly hard to get right. In fact, most complex schematics can be fully simulated and tested on a computer before a single resistor is purchased. But in many cases the final product requires lots of testing to make sure all the "bugs" are worked out. A PCB design makes this relatively straightforward. You can see and test everything on it very quickly. Not the case with a plastic-encased circuit.
Embedding electronic components and circuit pathways into hunks of plastic sounds like a fairly obvious evolutionary step up from the printed circuit board. If they can make the manufacturing process is cheap enough, I can't see why it wouldn't be the standard for consumer electronics in the foreseeable future.
Some downsides to consider:
Prototyping will be more difficult. If you discover a fatal bug in a non-trivial circuit, it can't be jumpered or otherwise worked around easily.
Calling it a "green" technology is insidious. Sure the manufacturing processes may involve fewer chemicals, but the resulting hunks of plastic are going to be much more difficult to recycle than components laid out on a PCB. The electronics industry is already a throw-away-when-obsolete economy, this will only help expand the concept further.
Hackers are going to have a much more difficult time modifying and repurposing their gear. You can't just solder and desolder the components and rewire things to make them do what you want. I guess many manufacturers will consider this a security feature (e.g., no more modchips on video game consoles). Reverse engineering hardware will also be more tricky. Where you might have needed a screwdriver before, you'll now need a drill.
Upsides to consider:
Building your own computer will basically be like playing with big Legos with drives, memory, and GPUs inside them.
There is a lot of software for the Nokia N810 and below. Switching out to a new UI means a lot of stuff will either get uprooted or there will be a lot of libraries loaded into the machine's precious little memory.
As it is, minor Maemo releases can (and sometimes do) break compatibility with applications while major releases are generally not expected to be backwards compatible at all. It works the same on any Linux distro or desktop environment. Development of Maemo has moved at a glacial pace, so when Nokia switches to Qt, I assure you it will be a major release.
I'm looking forward to Maemo on Qt 4 if for no other reason than it will make WebKit support a cinch. (The current official Maemo web browser uses Gecko and using it is generally an unpleasant experience.) In fact, if I recall correctly, there are some KDE folks trying to get KDE 4 ported to Maemo, with all the interface enhancements necessary to make it usable on small-screen devices.
Do you know that there area lot of public domain music works but very few recorded performances that are in the public domain?
I admit to not being a copyright expert here, but if you can copyright specific performances or editions of a work already in the public domain doesn't that make the work not really public domain in the practical sense?
What we need in copyright law is a bill, amendment, or whatever detailing exactly what public domain means and gives just as much protection to public domain works as it does to copyrighted works. There should be something saying that once a work is placed (of falls, for whatever reason) into the public domain, all derivative works, performances, and editions also default to the public domain, even if the derivative could be deemed transformative. (I'm of the opinion that if you want to stake a copyright claim to something, it should at least be your entirely new creation.)
Is it a brave decision? An insensitive one? Maybe the swastika simply doesn't hold the kind of meaning it did 60 years ago? I just find it somewhat peculiar.
No matter how evil the deeds of Hitler, the Nazi party, and it military arms, we can still learn to appreciate the engineering feats of those who thought they were working toward a good cause, one that happened to be symbolized by the swastika.
Granted, what little I know of World War II comes from history books and documentaries, but I've always suspected that most German citizens at the time must not have seen Hitler for the monster he really was either because they were misled until it was far too late or perhaps just turned the other cheek on the promise that he would turn the country into an economic superpower. Although my grandparents came to the U.S. before both world wars, I have extended family and a few friends in Germany and I would find it extremely hard to believe that their ancestors actively supported Hitler's atrocious acts.
It would be very interesting to close off part of a disused city or even a whole city and leave it as it is to see how nature would take over without human influences. Would it decay as some predict?. Would nature take over tower blocks for high rise living?... The nearest experiment we have is Chernobyl, but thats nothing like American conditions such as weather etc.. and a 2nd city to compare how nature adapts to part or even a whole city without humans around would be fascinating.
Large sections of Detroit have been like this for 10 years, so you don't have to go very far. Yes, there is some human influence in these areas (traffic, vandalism, fires, etc) but there certainly is no such thing as maintenance or improvement to these properties.
One of the saddest things I've seen was a gigantic brick-and-stone train station with beautiful architecture that looked like it hadn't been touched in 50 years, except of course to replace the wood boarding up the windows and update the graffiti. Something like this should be a museum or a landmark, but I guess no matter how beautiful a building is, if it's on the trashed side of town, then it's effectively worthless.
Sure, anybody can set up a web server to host their own content in theory, but its too difficult for average folks to do. With this technology, perhaps more people will sidestep commercial options, and host web pages on their own - meaning less reliance on geocities, google sites, ect. And thats good. It's not healthy for a few companies to have that sort of control over
Years ago, I remember certain broadband ISPs would probe certain ports on the customer's side (HTTP, FTP, etc) and do a variety of dickhead things if they found a server running (automatically update the customer to a more expensive plan, send warnings, terminate service) even if the "server" was serving no content or if a different application was listening on the port. Do companies still do this anymore?
Way back when I first learned about how TCP/IP worked, I knew that content corporations would always try to somehow override or make irrelevant the fact that the Internet is just a big network of peers rather than a "we only sell, you only buy" arrangement. It's the center issue of the whole net neutrality thing. It's just nice to see some companies at least trying to put more control back into the hands of the user.
There is an assumption that a persons private life can remain private unless there is a "public interest" that overrides it, but a person's identity is not protected.
When we talk about freedom of speech, "speech" means the expression (and usually distribution) of ideas. Supressing speech is censorship. There cannot be true freedom of speech without anonymity. There cannot be true freedom without freedom of speech.
I know the British people have never been all that excited about their individual rights, but the police state that's sprung up there in the last decade is not going away now. (At least not, without some major revolution... you tell me what the odds are on that.) The thing I fear most is that American goverment is going to look over the pond one day and go, "hmm, maybe we can learn a few tricks from those blokes." If they aren't already.
The (somewhat trickier) question, is not "How much energy does folding@home use?"; but "How does folding@home compare to other methods of doing the same calculations?".
Setting aside for the moment the issue of energy use, the whole point to folding@home is that it utilizes the otherwise idle processor cycles, meaning the scientists don't have to deploy their own equipment. As a nice bonus, they get a distributed processing cluster that by far exceeds anything they could ever get a grant for. Even if the distributed method were inefficient (which it isn't), it would still be mind-numbingly worth it for that reason alone.
Unfortunately, I suspect that folding@home might fall into that category. If everybody participating were able to total up the costs they incur by doing so, and just donate that to the project, you could probably get better results by buying hardware well matched to the task
I don't think so, and I'll explain why. I have a file server at home that consists primarily of a few disk drives and an Athlon 750MHz processor that was almost completely dormant. Idle, it draws 98 watts of power. (Whew. Yeah, that's why I'm replacing it soon.) With the CPU pegged at 100%, it draws 109 watts. So the effective power difference between "no folding" and "nearly 750MHz of folding" is 11 watts. No off-the-shelf computer that I'm aware of (yet) gets that kind of efficiency. I believe that with today's faster and more efficient computers, the delta is would be even smaller for much greater computer power (think multiple cores).
Now, if we calculate the cost of me running folding@home versus not, 11 watts at my local electric rate ($0.07 per kWh) for a years worth of folding comes out to $6.75. If I simply donated $6.25 to a folding project, they would likely spend nearly all of it just on administrative costs of processing the donation, let alone putting it towards their own private supercomputer.
Everytime folding@home comes up on Slashdot, we get all these comments talking about how they like the idea, but don't want to pay for the extra electricity it uses. But they never go on to figure out how much they would actually pay, for fear that it would disprove their rationalization. The fact is that electricity is cheap and any extra cost that you would incur by running folding@home can be easily offset many times over just by lowering the standby timeout on your monitor or some other trivial adjustment.
In a relatively small state like Michigan with nasty freeze-thaw cycles that probably cause massive damage to roads anyway, this probably is not a bad idea.
Actually it's a monumentally bad idea. Also, there really aren't that many "gravel roads" in Michigan. Oh sure, they might start out as gravel, but unless you're dumping new gravel on them every year, they turn into "dirt roads" so that's what we call them here.
In the winter, a paved road can be plowed perfectly clear whilst a dirt road cannot. You need to spread a lot more salt (or more commonly, sand) to keep a dirt road safe in the winter. To keep a dirt road in acceptable condition, you also have to have it grated at least once a year, something that costs money and is therefore never done. Rain and melting snow destroy dirt roads through erosion and the creation of ripples and potholes. Cars have a short life expectancy in Michigan already, but dirt roads only accelerate their deterioration through vibration, dust, mud, and flying rocks.
Michigan weather does do nasty things to roads, but I've been in plenty of other states (and even Canada) with similar weather and the local governments have zero problem keeping roads properly maintained. For being the automotive capital of the world, Michigan has always been completely bass-ackwards when it comes to cars and roads. One of the main reasons I'm looking to move out soon.
Assuming they do go ahead with making TPMs standard on motherboards, and lets assume Microsoft revives their plan to make it a hardware requirement in order for a PC to be fully Certified Windows Compatible (Microsoft had intended exactly that for Vista, but it got cut along with all the other Vista cuts), yeah all the Linux support could indeed help push this TPM crap along.
I guess I don't understand, then. So presumably, in order to get the keys to TPM, you'd have to pay the manufacturer of the TPM for them? If so, how is it going to work in Linux? In order to use the TPM kernel module (or whatever) and set policies on your own machine, you have to purchase the keys for your own machine?
Linux is huge in webservers. And one of the things you can do with the TPM system is check if a website visitor is running any sort of adblocker.
If I'm running an open-source software stack top to bottom, I don't see how a module on the motherboard could help enforce such an arbitrary policy as ad-blocking upon someone with complete control of the code running on their machine. Wouldn't the network stack and web browser both have to be specifically configured to enforce the displaying of ads, TPM or no?
I admit to not fully understanding how TPM works, so if I'm wrong, I'd be grateful if you could point me toward some documentation that explains these things a bit better, especially as how TPM apply to a machine running fully open source code.
It is about the law of diminishing returns. It might sound cold. It might suck. But you really need to consider why Pizza Hut doesn't offer Pickle Chocolate pizza... The effort and cost to patronize the.01% of potential users just isn't worth it.
In the commercial software world, you are exactly correct.
However in the open source world, people create, work on, and use the software that they need. It's the whole scratching-your-itch thing. The best example I can think of this is internationalization and localization. In the commercial software world, very few companies ever spend money writing translations for languages that aren't major languages in their core markets. That means at best you get a handful of languages for a given proprietary application, although I would guess that the vast majority only have one: English.
Completely different story in open source. Any sufficiently developed software has little to no hard-coded language in it. Instead, most applications utilize a message library so that translations can be added easily and rolled in upstream. As a result, people who work in a non-English language can choose their language when installing their open source OS and end up a userland that's completely customized with their language, units of measurements, and other local features. You rarely get such a complete experience in the proprietary market.
Disabled geeks should take this as an example of how to add accessibility features to the open source software that otherwise does what they need. No, perhaps accessibility features aren't as easy as adding a language to a message catalog, but the overall idea is the same. There may be plenty of fully-abled (if that's a PC term) developers who like to work on accessibility features, but only the disabled really know what they need. They are the ones that will have to lead the charge on developing frameworks for alternative interface methods and so forth for open source software. Everyone else will help as best they can purely in the interest of making the software better and making it accessible to as many people as possible.
What is exactly the cost of a Chernobyl scale accident? Unless the possibility of such an event is reduced to zero, we should really define this figure, and be prepared to spend it if the need arises.
Chernobyl happened over two decades ago, in a soviet nuclear facility that used old reactor technology (even for the time), had practically no safety features, and whose operators were both untrained and under-experienced.
The combination of modern reactor designs and stringent regulations make a Chernobyl-style meltdown utterly impossible. Chernobyl should not be compared to modern nuclear power any more than DOS 1.0 should be compared to Windows 7. Also, most people tend to forget that the U.S. already has 52 operating nuclear plants that chug along just fine every day, almost all without a single solitary incident in their entire history. Nuclear power generation does have its risks but so do all forms of electricity generation. I'd gladly wager that there have been a lot more deaths from the procurement and burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil than there ever will from the generation of nuclear power. If your criteria for "safe" power is a risk of zero, then you probably should disconnect yourself from the grid right now because there is no such thing as zero-risk power generation and there never will be.
Any other straw men you'd like to try and bat down?
Think about when there's bad weather with your satellite dish. The picture is either there, or it's completely gone. With analog, you get varying degrees of static depending on how bad the signal is, but when there's bad weather, like hurricanes or blizzards, you can make out some of what's going on to get the news.
While I get what you're saying, and I don't think the analogy is completely useless, you have to keep in mind that satellite and terrestrial signals are completely different in terms of reception and signal propgation. A satellite signal needs two things: accurate alignment of the dish and direct line of sight between the satellite and dish. So while inclement weather does tend to mess with these on a satellite receiver, neither is strictly necessary for a terrestrial broadcast, whether analog or digital.
Now if your reception of the digital signal was marginal to begin with, then yes, bad weather might degrade the signal enough to make it unwatchable. However, digital receivers seem to vary considerably in the ability to compensate for a spotty signal. Some do quite poorly (just show a black screen with "no signal") while others might show a blocky mess but the audio will at least be intelligible.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not so much in reply to your comment as the comic you linked to...
As an athiest, I would give anything to have Christians or followers of other religions come up to me and say, "I find your views completely ridiculous and here's why." It would show me that they are at least evaluating their own views (in comparison to mine, granted) instead of just running around spewing out all the half-baked ideas that were preached into them since they were 4 years old. Like so many people I've run into throughout my life.
You're my hero. You sound just like Penn Jilette. (That's a compliment.)
This is what kills me the most about religious extremists. They don't stop to think, "wait a minute... my god is all-powerful and all-knowing... maybe he can figure out defend himself from people calling him names?"
Baby steps and all.
A decade ago, this article's headline would have only appeared on one particular day of the year.
(Also, this could mean that before the year's end, I should finally be able to purchase my very own spaghetti tree.)
I hate to be that bitter old pessimist, but this has been debated to death and back here on Slashdot many times over. I swear, it should be in the FAQ by now.
All of the times this question has come up (feels like at least once a month), there have been many very good suggestions. Why should we rehash them for the nth time?
You're thinking of BOFHs.
I believe that it's ethically wrong to decrypt a satellite data stream for the purpose of watching TV content that you didn't pay for. However, a person's right to research technology should always trump that. Everyone should have the right to receive, analyze, decrypt, and otherwise make use of any signal that makes use of public spectrum and makes its way onto the property that they own or the space that they legally inhabit. If the satellite (and other wireless content) providers don't want people to break their encryption, then they need to use encryption that can't be broken by amateurs. As the law currently stands, they could run their data stream through rot13 (or something almost as trivial) and still bring the DMCA down on everyone from satellite "pirates," to hobbyists, to people who forgot to renew their subscription.
The first few marketing seem to show it running Moblin, which is based on Linux and is 100% the perfect OS and interface for this style of computer.
But of course, the spec sheet lists Windows XP. And lately Asus has been totally putting out for Microsoft.
One of these days, I keep praying that OEMs will wise up to the fact that the importance of quality software is rapidly overtaking the importance of the quality of the hardware.
I mean a prototype of the final product. If you have good engineers, the circuit itself is not often terribly hard to get right. In fact, most complex schematics can be fully simulated and tested on a computer before a single resistor is purchased. But in many cases the final product requires lots of testing to make sure all the "bugs" are worked out. A PCB design makes this relatively straightforward. You can see and test everything on it very quickly. Not the case with a plastic-encased circuit.
Are questions as headlines overrated? Film at 11.
Embedding electronic components and circuit pathways into hunks of plastic sounds like a fairly obvious evolutionary step up from the printed circuit board. If they can make the manufacturing process is cheap enough, I can't see why it wouldn't be the standard for consumer electronics in the foreseeable future.
Some downsides to consider:
Prototyping will be more difficult. If you discover a fatal bug in a non-trivial circuit, it can't be jumpered or otherwise worked around easily.
Calling it a "green" technology is insidious. Sure the manufacturing processes may involve fewer chemicals, but the resulting hunks of plastic are going to be much more difficult to recycle than components laid out on a PCB. The electronics industry is already a throw-away-when-obsolete economy, this will only help expand the concept further.
Hackers are going to have a much more difficult time modifying and repurposing their gear. You can't just solder and desolder the components and rewire things to make them do what you want. I guess many manufacturers will consider this a security feature (e.g., no more modchips on video game consoles). Reverse engineering hardware will also be more tricky. Where you might have needed a screwdriver before, you'll now need a drill.
Upsides to consider:
Building your own computer will basically be like playing with big Legos with drives, memory, and GPUs inside them.
Fine by me. The stuff I want to listen to is not under the RIAA's or ASCAP's jurisdiction anyway.
As it is, minor Maemo releases can (and sometimes do) break compatibility with applications while major releases are generally not expected to be backwards compatible at all. It works the same on any Linux distro or desktop environment. Development of Maemo has moved at a glacial pace, so when Nokia switches to Qt, I assure you it will be a major release.
I'm looking forward to Maemo on Qt 4 if for no other reason than it will make WebKit support a cinch. (The current official Maemo web browser uses Gecko and using it is generally an unpleasant experience.) In fact, if I recall correctly, there are some KDE folks trying to get KDE 4 ported to Maemo, with all the interface enhancements necessary to make it usable on small-screen devices.
I admit to not being a copyright expert here, but if you can copyright specific performances or editions of a work already in the public domain doesn't that make the work not really public domain in the practical sense?
What we need in copyright law is a bill, amendment, or whatever detailing exactly what public domain means and gives just as much protection to public domain works as it does to copyrighted works. There should be something saying that once a work is placed (of falls, for whatever reason) into the public domain, all derivative works, performances, and editions also default to the public domain, even if the derivative could be deemed transformative. (I'm of the opinion that if you want to stake a copyright claim to something, it should at least be your entirely new creation.)
No matter how evil the deeds of Hitler, the Nazi party, and it military arms, we can still learn to appreciate the engineering feats of those who thought they were working toward a good cause, one that happened to be symbolized by the swastika.
Granted, what little I know of World War II comes from history books and documentaries, but I've always suspected that most German citizens at the time must not have seen Hitler for the monster he really was either because they were misled until it was far too late or perhaps just turned the other cheek on the promise that he would turn the country into an economic superpower. Although my grandparents came to the U.S. before both world wars, I have extended family and a few friends in Germany and I would find it extremely hard to believe that their ancestors actively supported Hitler's atrocious acts.
Large sections of Detroit have been like this for 10 years, so you don't have to go very far. Yes, there is some human influence in these areas (traffic, vandalism, fires, etc) but there certainly is no such thing as maintenance or improvement to these properties.
One of the saddest things I've seen was a gigantic brick-and-stone train station with beautiful architecture that looked like it hadn't been touched in 50 years, except of course to replace the wood boarding up the windows and update the graffiti. Something like this should be a museum or a landmark, but I guess no matter how beautiful a building is, if it's on the trashed side of town, then it's effectively worthless.
Years ago, I remember certain broadband ISPs would probe certain ports on the customer's side (HTTP, FTP, etc) and do a variety of dickhead things if they found a server running (automatically update the customer to a more expensive plan, send warnings, terminate service) even if the "server" was serving no content or if a different application was listening on the port. Do companies still do this anymore?
Way back when I first learned about how TCP/IP worked, I knew that content corporations would always try to somehow override or make irrelevant the fact that the Internet is just a big network of peers rather than a "we only sell, you only buy" arrangement. It's the center issue of the whole net neutrality thing. It's just nice to see some companies at least trying to put more control back into the hands of the user.
When we talk about freedom of speech, "speech" means the expression (and usually distribution) of ideas. Supressing speech is censorship. There cannot be true freedom of speech without anonymity. There cannot be true freedom without freedom of speech.
I know the British people have never been all that excited about their individual rights, but the police state that's sprung up there in the last decade is not going away now. (At least not, without some major revolution... you tell me what the odds are on that.) The thing I fear most is that American goverment is going to look over the pond one day and go, "hmm, maybe we can learn a few tricks from those blokes." If they aren't already.
I'm usually more concerned about how much free space I have after a power outage.
Setting aside for the moment the issue of energy use, the whole point to folding@home is that it utilizes the otherwise idle processor cycles, meaning the scientists don't have to deploy their own equipment. As a nice bonus, they get a distributed processing cluster that by far exceeds anything they could ever get a grant for. Even if the distributed method were inefficient (which it isn't), it would still be mind-numbingly worth it for that reason alone.
I don't think so, and I'll explain why. I have a file server at home that consists primarily of a few disk drives and an Athlon 750MHz processor that was almost completely dormant. Idle, it draws 98 watts of power. (Whew. Yeah, that's why I'm replacing it soon.) With the CPU pegged at 100%, it draws 109 watts. So the effective power difference between "no folding" and "nearly 750MHz of folding" is 11 watts. No off-the-shelf computer that I'm aware of (yet) gets that kind of efficiency. I believe that with today's faster and more efficient computers, the delta is would be even smaller for much greater computer power (think multiple cores).
Now, if we calculate the cost of me running folding@home versus not, 11 watts at my local electric rate ($0.07 per kWh) for a years worth of folding comes out to $6.75. If I simply donated $6.25 to a folding project, they would likely spend nearly all of it just on administrative costs of processing the donation, let alone putting it towards their own private supercomputer.
Everytime folding@home comes up on Slashdot, we get all these comments talking about how they like the idea, but don't want to pay for the extra electricity it uses. But they never go on to figure out how much they would actually pay, for fear that it would disprove their rationalization. The fact is that electricity is cheap and any extra cost that you would incur by running folding@home can be easily offset many times over just by lowering the standby timeout on your monitor or some other trivial adjustment.
Actually it's a monumentally bad idea. Also, there really aren't that many "gravel roads" in Michigan. Oh sure, they might start out as gravel, but unless you're dumping new gravel on them every year, they turn into "dirt roads" so that's what we call them here.
In the winter, a paved road can be plowed perfectly clear whilst a dirt road cannot. You need to spread a lot more salt (or more commonly, sand) to keep a dirt road safe in the winter. To keep a dirt road in acceptable condition, you also have to have it grated at least once a year, something that costs money and is therefore never done. Rain and melting snow destroy dirt roads through erosion and the creation of ripples and potholes. Cars have a short life expectancy in Michigan already, but dirt roads only accelerate their deterioration through vibration, dust, mud, and flying rocks.
Michigan weather does do nasty things to roads, but I've been in plenty of other states (and even Canada) with similar weather and the local governments have zero problem keeping roads properly maintained. For being the automotive capital of the world, Michigan has always been completely bass-ackwards when it comes to cars and roads. One of the main reasons I'm looking to move out soon.
Whoops, you spelled his name wrong, it should be "Zephram Cochrane".
I guess I don't understand, then. So presumably, in order to get the keys to TPM, you'd have to pay the manufacturer of the TPM for them? If so, how is it going to work in Linux? In order to use the TPM kernel module (or whatever) and set policies on your own machine, you have to purchase the keys for your own machine?
If I'm running an open-source software stack top to bottom, I don't see how a module on the motherboard could help enforce such an arbitrary policy as ad-blocking upon someone with complete control of the code running on their machine. Wouldn't the network stack and web browser both have to be specifically configured to enforce the displaying of ads, TPM or no?
I admit to not fully understanding how TPM works, so if I'm wrong, I'd be grateful if you could point me toward some documentation that explains these things a bit better, especially as how TPM apply to a machine running fully open source code.
In the commercial software world, you are exactly correct.
However in the open source world, people create, work on, and use the software that they need. It's the whole scratching-your-itch thing. The best example I can think of this is internationalization and localization. In the commercial software world, very few companies ever spend money writing translations for languages that aren't major languages in their core markets. That means at best you get a handful of languages for a given proprietary application, although I would guess that the vast majority only have one: English.
Completely different story in open source. Any sufficiently developed software has little to no hard-coded language in it. Instead, most applications utilize a message library so that translations can be added easily and rolled in upstream. As a result, people who work in a non-English language can choose their language when installing their open source OS and end up a userland that's completely customized with their language, units of measurements, and other local features. You rarely get such a complete experience in the proprietary market.
Disabled geeks should take this as an example of how to add accessibility features to the open source software that otherwise does what they need. No, perhaps accessibility features aren't as easy as adding a language to a message catalog, but the overall idea is the same. There may be plenty of fully-abled (if that's a PC term) developers who like to work on accessibility features, but only the disabled really know what they need. They are the ones that will have to lead the charge on developing frameworks for alternative interface methods and so forth for open source software. Everyone else will help as best they can purely in the interest of making the software better and making it accessible to as many people as possible.
Chernobyl happened over two decades ago, in a soviet nuclear facility that used old reactor technology (even for the time), had practically no safety features, and whose operators were both untrained and under-experienced.
The combination of modern reactor designs and stringent regulations make a Chernobyl-style meltdown utterly impossible. Chernobyl should not be compared to modern nuclear power any more than DOS 1.0 should be compared to Windows 7. Also, most people tend to forget that the U.S. already has 52 operating nuclear plants that chug along just fine every day, almost all without a single solitary incident in their entire history. Nuclear power generation does have its risks but so do all forms of electricity generation. I'd gladly wager that there have been a lot more deaths from the procurement and burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil than there ever will from the generation of nuclear power. If your criteria for "safe" power is a risk of zero, then you probably should disconnect yourself from the grid right now because there is no such thing as zero-risk power generation and there never will be.
Any other straw men you'd like to try and bat down?
While I get what you're saying, and I don't think the analogy is completely useless, you have to keep in mind that satellite and terrestrial signals are completely different in terms of reception and signal propgation. A satellite signal needs two things: accurate alignment of the dish and direct line of sight between the satellite and dish. So while inclement weather does tend to mess with these on a satellite receiver, neither is strictly necessary for a terrestrial broadcast, whether analog or digital.
Now if your reception of the digital signal was marginal to begin with, then yes, bad weather might degrade the signal enough to make it unwatchable. However, digital receivers seem to vary considerably in the ability to compensate for a spotty signal. Some do quite poorly (just show a black screen with "no signal") while others might show a blocky mess but the audio will at least be intelligible.