I've long thought the same. Looking at the US situation, that method of government (american style democracy (i'm usian, btw)) (oh and I like scheme;) works really well in small groups with common interests. And it *still* works well in the right scale: small towns, social groups (neighborhood associations, PTG's etc) but rapidly loses effectiveness as you move up in scale. In fact I think the number, at least for governed populations, is much smaller than 1e7. You really need to know at least a sizable portion of your fellow citizens to develop a situation where you give a damn about the rest of the population. Once you get to a "them" mentality, its all over because who cares if it hurts "them" so long as "we" get what we need/want. I think that if the local level is working well, then it will carry up the government ladder to regional and even national levels because the local effectiveness keeps people involved. If you, as a citizen, have access (I mean *real* access) to your elected representatives, and those representatives have some clue who you are, then government will work for you. If not, then apathy sets in.
Probably the same for capitalism as well. Capitalism works great when everyone knows everyone else, or at least most everyone else. I, as a retailer, know my customers and my customers know me. I'm happy to sell to them for a reasonable price that supports me in a reasonable manner and they are happy to buy from me knowing that they're not being screwed. They know this because they know me and know my lifestyle, at least somewhat. Once you no longer know your customers, then you begin to view them as objects with money that you want to get. It's sort of inevitable (I know, I own retail businesses). Likewise, if you as a customer don't know the producers/retailers of goods and services you purchase then you objectivize(?) those people and no longer care about their living and working conditions, you begin to just want the stuff as cheap as you can get it.
It is my opinion, based purely on anecdotal experience, that the system breaks irrevocably once the scale of the local population gets above some number of thousands (maybe 10-50, at a guess) and the population at large is also sufficiently large (a few million?).
This way when some critical info gets missed in the redaction process, there's no one to blame! So not only will our (I'm usian) gov't be more efficient about hiding stuff from us, no one will have to take the fall if it goes wrong.
That said, I'm amazed at what modern Ai can do. It's not clear, from this rather thin article, how much this system depends on human input to prevent mistakes. There must be some kind of training process. What is the state of these kinds of systems? I remember from some AI courses I took years ago, that they worked well but inevitably someone would end up calling someone else something stupid. Then the machine would start skipping important bits and the coders would look like idiots.
That was hard and a real stretch there at the end. blah.
don't bother with transporting around huge batteries, just beam massive amounts of energy into a hydrogen generator (electrolysis). Of course, its not that great in the desert, but still. If you can produce fuel *at* the fuel depot instead of transporting it in, that's a major chunk of your supply line completely eliminated.
Couple of that with rail guns for artillery and also the possibility of redirecting the "energy" beam to more direct uses against the enemy and you've got a much lighter-weight deployment.
hmmm... I don't disagree. But that leads me to this head asploding conclusion:
AT&T admits they're spying. Does that make them more desirable than the others? The enemy you know is better than the enemy you don't know, sort of thing?
I have to admit, the more I think about it, I'd rather go with a carrier that I *know* is spying on me because they've admitted it than with one I also more or less *know* is spying but won't admit it. It's all too much. Back to tin cans and strings. At least then you can see the other string knotted on there and follow it to that dork down the street and pound him for it.
I'm a disgruntled didn't-choose-to-be-AT&T-customer due to the cingular buyout and can't wait to get out... tick tick tick goes the contract. The sad thing is I don't there's any real choice for services in my market. They all seem to be just slightly less-crappy than each other. Not sure how that really works out in the end.
That's a pretty cool little bit. It only makes sense, if the entire system is imaged onto the harddrive, why not just pull up that whole image from the bootloader and run it from there. Obviously there's more to it than just that, but still its a concept that makes sense.
I see potential problems though if you've got changing hardware. By loading the kernel, you can reprobe the hardware (haven't watched a resume in a while to see if it actually does, but at least the mechanism is there). If you just drag in the whole image and restart execution one potentially changed hardware, that's a problem. But then I don't know whether hibernate handles changing hardware very gracefully anyway. blah blah blah rambling.
Can you imagine the confusion when someone from Boston tries to telepathically communicate with someone from Scotland and they keep dropping that hint of purple in the pattern for cauliflower that they coincidentally use as a representation for the bathroom and the californian keeps envisioning a tuna roll with extra wasabi in response to the Scot's request for another shot of whiskey?
In all honesty I never shutdown for a few reasons, some of which are not really valid, but make me happy:
1) I can't stand waiting for a boot. When I sit down at my rig, I want to work *NOW* not at some later time. A super fast boot would help, but might not eliminate this particular issue for me.
2) I run debian sid. Sometimes rebooting is a problem. I want to reboot when I'm in a position to potentially spend time fixing something. It hasn't happened often, but it has happened.
3) I generally use slightly older/scavenged hardware, if it's working at the moment, I don't want to risk it not powercycling. Sometimes that old video card or whatever won't come back up (I suspect this is some sort of technological equivalent to voodoo).
Sure its a practical problem, especially with smaller organizations where your scenario is more likely. But that doesn't absolve an organization from its responsibilities. And its also the purpose of things like contracts.
Regardless, if the organization fails to perform its contractual obligations, then there are methods for dealing with that. It is the responsibility of the organization to keep track of its obligations and it is the customer's responsibility to be prepared to deal with an organization that doesn't live up to its obligations. This can range from simply pointing out the problem to filing a lawsuit. A lot of contracts actually deal with this scenario specifically. For example, my two commercial leases have clauses that allow for transfer of the contract to other parties, but force the parties to maintain the terms of contract despite this transfer. But I'm wandering OT with that.
Are the people who made those promises to you still in charge of the product? In theory this is irrelevant. The other side of the "corporate" coin -- that is, the side that doesn't involved shielding everyone involved from being liable for being jerks -- is that it, the corporation, persists beyond the tenure of its employees, officers, etc. Promises made by people on behalf of the corporation (or other business structure) are still binding on that corporation after those people leave. At least that's the theory. Of course now-a-days corps can do whatever they "want" with little or no repercussion.
As someone who is now collecting a fairly significant backlog of mail archives, I gotta ask: Is it worth it? How often do you actually need access to those archives and do they provide the resource you think they should? I know storage is cheap and I've got plenty of it, so I don't think I'll *stop* archiving, but sometimes I wonder. I've had to access them once in about 3 years. I was able to zgrep a big zip archive of emails to find a reference I needed, but it wasn't something I could live without. Convenient? yes. worth the time and effort to maintain those archives? probably not.
Part of my motivation for asking is because I've changed the way I file my paper files and suspect that I could treat my email the same way. I now file all my stuff, unsorted, in a box. The typical office depot collapsible box will hold about 3 months worth of records. 99% of the time, if I need something out of the "files" its in the current box in reverse chronological order and relatively easy to find. Boxes go in storage with the date range on them and after a few years, just get thrown out. I waste 0 time filing and since in reality almost never need access to the back files, there's no real penalty in the retrieval time either.
Agreed but it's highly illegal to take all politicians and corperate executives and kill them on pikes in public. It is only illegal if you don't get *ALL* of them and leave enough behind to carry on the current government. Once you institute a new government, then it is up to that *new* government to determine whether the public pike thing was illegal.
Essentially you'd have to be willing to lose all your information. That's the crux of these issues in my opinion. If you've got some info that is sooper-important-2-keep-sekret then you have to be willing to lose that information altogether in order to ensure it is still secret. In that case, then this idea is a pretty good one. Sort of the MI idea: this tape will self-destruct in 5 seconds deal. If you didn't happen to get the information, well that's better than the bad guys getting it.
When you run afoul of the law though, there is another issue. Can you prove you don't have the info elsewhere? If you can't *prove* that you can't produce the information, then you're in the same position as you would be if you merely refused to divulge the information. IOW, the torturers have to believe you can't produce that information. I would assume that belief sets in somewhere around the brink of your death, with the range extending, of course, beyond the brink of your death.
Still, in the case of lose the information rather than divulge it (certainly viable in a lot of criminal situations, I'd guess), it's a pretty good idea. Pretty complicated to implement and very touchy to operate, but still useful.
What do you do when the cat kicks the power cord out of machine A while you're elbow deep in the guts of machine B replacing some card? The possibility for accidental bricking of the whole thing seems to high to me. Of course, you could add more machines to the system, reducing the chances of this happening, but then you raise the opportunities for having it compromised. Still, I like your idea.
I know what you're getting at but your wrong and OP is right. here is a guy from one of the leading/largest tech *developing* companies in the world. He has ample resources available to do this and should just do it instead of bitching about it.
Now if he had been the IT purchasing guy for some tech *using* company that really wanted to switch to linux, but were having problems that could be solved by this, and the community had said "if you want it go make it, bitch" to this non-tech person from a tech *using*, not tech *developing*, company then, yeah, you'd be totally right.
Slashdot Mirror
I've long thought the same. Looking at the US situation, that method of government (american style democracy (i'm usian, btw)) (oh and I like scheme;) works really well in small groups with common interests. And it *still* works well in the right scale: small towns, social groups (neighborhood associations, PTG's etc) but rapidly loses effectiveness as you move up in scale. In fact I think the number, at least for governed populations, is much smaller than 1e7. You really need to know at least a sizable portion of your fellow citizens to develop a situation where you give a damn about the rest of the population. Once you get to a "them" mentality, its all over because who cares if it hurts "them" so long as "we" get what we need/want. I think that if the local level is working well, then it will carry up the government ladder to regional and even national levels because the local effectiveness keeps people involved. If you, as a citizen, have access (I mean *real* access) to your elected representatives, and those representatives have some clue who you are, then government will work for you. If not, then apathy sets in.
Probably the same for capitalism as well. Capitalism works great when everyone knows everyone else, or at least most everyone else. I, as a retailer, know my customers and my customers know me. I'm happy to sell to them for a reasonable price that supports me in a reasonable manner and they are happy to buy from me knowing that they're not being screwed. They know this because they know me and know my lifestyle, at least somewhat. Once you no longer know your customers, then you begin to view them as objects with money that you want to get. It's sort of inevitable (I know, I own retail businesses). Likewise, if you as a customer don't know the producers/retailers of goods and services you purchase then you objectivize(?) those people and no longer care about their living and working conditions, you begin to just want the stuff as cheap as you can get it.
It is my opinion, based purely on anecdotal experience, that the system breaks irrevocably once the scale of the local population gets above some number of thousands (maybe 10-50, at a guess) and the population at large is also sufficiently large (a few million?).
poprocks.
This way when some critical info gets missed in the redaction process, there's no one to blame! So not only will our (I'm usian) gov't be more efficient about hiding stuff from us, no one will have to take the fall if it goes wrong.
That said, I'm amazed at what modern Ai can do. It's not clear, from this rather thin article, how much this system depends on human input to prevent mistakes. There must be some kind of training process. What is the state of these kinds of systems? I remember from some AI courses I took years ago, that they worked well but inevitably someone would end up calling someone else something stupid. Then the machine would start skipping important bits and the coders would look like idiots.
That was hard and a real stretch there at the end. blah.
*Phew*
I was afraid someone was going to call me on the spelling.
Do not look at transmitter with remaining eye.
Kiiiiiiinnnnnaaaaaayyyyyyyyyydddddddaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!
don't bother with transporting around huge batteries, just beam massive amounts of energy into a hydrogen generator (electrolysis). Of course, its not that great in the desert, but still. If you can produce fuel *at* the fuel depot instead of transporting it in, that's a major chunk of your supply line completely eliminated.
Couple of that with rail guns for artillery and also the possibility of redirecting the "energy" beam to more direct uses against the enemy and you've got a much lighter-weight deployment.
hmmm... I don't disagree. But that leads me to this head asploding conclusion:
AT&T admits they're spying. Does that make them more desirable than the others? The enemy you know is better than the enemy you don't know, sort of thing?
I have to admit, the more I think about it, I'd rather go with a carrier that I *know* is spying on me because they've admitted it than with one I also more or less *know* is spying but won't admit it. It's all too much. Back to tin cans and strings. At least then you can see the other string knotted on there and follow it to that dork down the street and pound him for it.
I'm a disgruntled didn't-choose-to-be-AT&T-customer due to the cingular buyout and can't wait to get out... tick tick tick goes the contract. The sad thing is I don't there's any real choice for services in my market. They all seem to be just slightly less-crappy than each other. Not sure how that really works out in the end.
That's a pretty cool little bit. It only makes sense, if the entire system is imaged onto the harddrive, why not just pull up that whole image from the bootloader and run it from there. Obviously there's more to it than just that, but still its a concept that makes sense.
I see potential problems though if you've got changing hardware. By loading the kernel, you can reprobe the hardware (haven't watched a resume in a while to see if it actually does, but at least the mechanism is there). If you just drag in the whole image and restart execution one potentially changed hardware, that's a problem. But then I don't know whether hibernate handles changing hardware very gracefully anyway. blah blah blah rambling.
hey people... *whoosh*
don't you get it? OP is dropping one telco thats sells your personal data for another that just outright spies on you...
sheesh
Ah, but you are a master of cryp.... um... crypticness!
So, is it "titaniced" or "titanicked"?
I hope you don't panic. I certainly haven't panicked.
Regardless, nothing beats "embiggened" (or is it "embiggenned"?).
Can you imagine the confusion when someone from Boston tries to telepathically communicate with someone from Scotland and they keep dropping that hint of purple in the pattern for cauliflower that they coincidentally use as a representation for the bathroom and the californian keeps envisioning a tuna roll with extra wasabi in response to the Scot's request for another shot of whiskey?
In all honesty I never shutdown for a few reasons, some of which are not really valid, but make me happy:
1) I can't stand waiting for a boot. When I sit down at my rig, I want to work *NOW* not at some later time. A super fast boot would help, but might not eliminate this particular issue for me.
2) I run debian sid. Sometimes rebooting is a problem. I want to reboot when I'm in a position to potentially spend time fixing something. It hasn't happened often, but it has happened.
3) I generally use slightly older/scavenged hardware, if it's working at the moment, I don't want to risk it not powercycling. Sometimes that old video card or whatever won't come back up (I suspect this is some sort of technological equivalent to voodoo).
4) Uptime r0x0rz!!!
Sure its a practical problem, especially with smaller organizations where your scenario is more likely. But that doesn't absolve an organization from its responsibilities. And its also the purpose of things like contracts.
Regardless, if the organization fails to perform its contractual obligations, then there are methods for dealing with that. It is the responsibility of the organization to keep track of its obligations and it is the customer's responsibility to be prepared to deal with an organization that doesn't live up to its obligations. This can range from simply pointing out the problem to filing a lawsuit. A lot of contracts actually deal with this scenario specifically. For example, my two commercial leases have clauses that allow for transfer of the contract to other parties, but force the parties to maintain the terms of contract despite this transfer. But I'm wandering OT with that.
As someone who is now collecting a fairly significant backlog of mail archives, I gotta ask: Is it worth it? How often do you actually need access to those archives and do they provide the resource you think they should? I know storage is cheap and I've got plenty of it, so I don't think I'll *stop* archiving, but sometimes I wonder. I've had to access them once in about 3 years. I was able to zgrep a big zip archive of emails to find a reference I needed, but it wasn't something I could live without. Convenient? yes. worth the time and effort to maintain those archives? probably not.
Part of my motivation for asking is because I've changed the way I file my paper files and suspect that I could treat my email the same way. I now file all my stuff, unsorted, in a box. The typical office depot collapsible box will hold about 3 months worth of records. 99% of the time, if I need something out of the "files" its in the current box in reverse chronological order and relatively easy to find. Boxes go in storage with the date range on them and after a few years, just get thrown out. I waste 0 time filing and since in reality almost never need access to the back files, there's no real penalty in the retrieval time either.
meh. must be a slow day.
Its all a matter of perspective.
Aw crap. I lost.
Essentially you'd have to be willing to lose all your information. That's the crux of these issues in my opinion. If you've got some info that is sooper-important-2-keep-sekret then you have to be willing to lose that information altogether in order to ensure it is still secret. In that case, then this idea is a pretty good one. Sort of the MI idea: this tape will self-destruct in 5 seconds deal. If you didn't happen to get the information, well that's better than the bad guys getting it.
When you run afoul of the law though, there is another issue. Can you prove you don't have the info elsewhere? If you can't *prove* that you can't produce the information, then you're in the same position as you would be if you merely refused to divulge the information. IOW, the torturers have to believe you can't produce that information. I would assume that belief sets in somewhere around the brink of your death, with the range extending, of course, beyond the brink of your death.
Still, in the case of lose the information rather than divulge it (certainly viable in a lot of criminal situations, I'd guess), it's a pretty good idea. Pretty complicated to implement and very touchy to operate, but still useful.
What do you do when the cat kicks the power cord out of machine A while you're elbow deep in the guts of machine B replacing some card? The possibility for accidental bricking of the whole thing seems to high to me. Of course, you could add more machines to the system, reducing the chances of this happening, but then you raise the opportunities for having it compromised. Still, I like your idea.
Dear AC, I can post my own mea culpas.
kthxbye.
I know what you're getting at but your wrong and OP is right. here is a guy from one of the leading/largest tech *developing* companies in the world. He has ample resources available to do this and should just do it instead of bitching about it.
Now if he had been the IT purchasing guy for some tech *using* company that really wanted to switch to linux, but were having problems that could be solved by this, and the community had said "if you want it go make it, bitch" to this non-tech person from a tech *using*, not tech *developing*, company then, yeah, you'd be totally right.
Wow! this is so not off-topic. wake up mods. try google.
here, I'll make it easy for you.
http://www.bigear.org/6equj5.htm