Every person over 18 goes onto a voting roll, they check you off that list when you enter a venue that has been set up to take votes (or when they receive an absentee vote by mail), they hand you a peice of paper, you tick the appropriate boxes and place it into a large locked container.
But... but... that's so low-tech! This is the twenty-first century!!! Of course we must have Computerised iVoting.
Besides, everyone knows Australia is inhabited by convicts, so what do they know about voting? And counting manually takes so much time, computers are instant!
That just means that you are informed, read independent viewpoints, publish on the internet, do not use a portal for Slashdot, and read "Applied Cryptography." Good for you! But what is the percentage of people out there that can say that? Or do you believe only the tech-savvy geeks should be allowed to have their vote counted?
As your signature quotes,
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." -Oscar Wilde
Socialism is an economic system based on the premise that government should control of industries and businesses for the betterment of the people.... Real world experience with socialism is that it is not nearly as efficient at maximizing the economy
Hmmm... a couple of questions come to mind...
What do we call it when businesses control the government for the betterment of the people?
Why should efficiency at maximizing the economy be the standard of a good government? (Not that I have anything against growing and/or efficient economies... but why should it be the primary job of the government?)
As a software developer the GPL scares me.... As a result I probably end up writing a lot more code from scratch than I probably need to. I usually avoid all types of "open source" since im affraid ill accidently do something wrong.
That is certainly a good and safe thing to do. (But why scared?) What I do is: if I think using any GPL'ed code would help any project I'm working on, I tell the bosses: in project X we can cut n weeks off our dev. time if we use this GPL'ed code. If we do, then we will have to release the source code to X. That makes sense because none of our secrets will be compromised by releasing the source to X because the value of our product lies elsewhere. (In our case, providing web services and support apps.)
Suits are very nervous about releasing anything that might be "our intellectual property." My job is to tell them honestly what the pros and cons are of using GPL'ed code; after that it's their decision. They are keenly aware of the cost savings involved if the schedule can be sped up by n weeks.
Another way I've done it is: parts of project Y will be helped by using GPL'ed code. But we don't want to release Y -- what to do? Split project Y into pieces y_i. Each piece is an executable that can run independently and does part of the job. Piece y_j uses GPL'ed code; we release the complete source to program y_j. Doing it this way has a side benefit: it forces you into a better design, that of individually testable modules.
... problems like this make it hard for companies to adopt GPL products.
What makes you think the objective is for "companies to adopt GPL products"?
If a company doesn't want to use the GPL, of course that's their choice -- and in that case they are not allowed to copy ("rip-off") GPL'ed code. As simple as that. You want to use the fruits of our hard work? Fine, as long as you play by our rules. TANSTAAFL -- the cost of copying GPL-ed code is that you must GPL your modifications/additions. You get to decide for yourself if that's a fair price.
Last I checked, Microsoft (or any other company) did not allow Linksys/Cisco to modify Windows for use in their routers for free. Why should we?
I hope you know the difference between equality and implication. All apples are fruits; this does not mean that the property of being a fruit is identical to the property of being an apple. Solaris uses open standards like NFS (in fact Sun came up with NFS) but Solaris is not open source.
Open source ==> Open standards
Open standards =/=> Open standards Therefore Open source != Open standards
The reporter unfortunately slanted the story as MS vs Linux. The state says it chose "open standards, including Linux" -- which seems to imply that it's closed standards that are taboo. If they're talking about file formats, network protocols etc. it is of course the sensible thing to do, since you're not vulnerable to losing your documents if the program is no longer supported, and you're not compelling everyone you communicate with to use exactly the same software as you do. Big difference between this and saying that they're only going to use Linux, which makes it seem as though they're retaliating against MS.
Not exactly. With CRTs, the dot has to be refreshed every so often i.e. refresh rate so the image doesn't flicker. If the pixel stays the same colour i.e. doesn't fade, then it only needs to be refreshed at 24 Hz, the movie's frame rate. If you only care about showing a cine movie, you don't really need a refresh rate any better than 24 Hz. This is why LCD screens can get by with lower refresh rates. This is also why digital graphics can show much nicer movement, your refresh rate is not limited to 24 fps.
On the other hand, I find movement in movies very distracting because the image flashes painfully. Widescreen movies are the worst because your peripheral vision is more sensitive to movement. I think 24 fps for movies is too low, we should have a new cine standard with a higher frame rate. Maybe 36 fps.
Obviously a home office is the best approach. I work from home most days. In my office I have a door (which I don't need to close because no one else is in the house during the day), and a window with a beautiful San Francisco view. I can play my music as loud as I want, and I'm home for UPS deliveries. Of course it's nice that I don't have to waste time commuting; however the best part -- employers take note -- is that if I need to work late or on weekends, I can do it from home, which means my family doesn't miss having me around for dinner or a walk in the park. No worries about having forgotten that documentation I was reading at home. Sure, those offices in the article look nice. But I'm not at the mercy of a PHB for my work environment, and if I change jobs I still have my cool setup. I've a wireless network too, so I can work outside on the deck with my laptop whenever I want.
Someday they'll realise that if we just want to goof off, we can do that just as well at the office; working from home I'm usually at my desk from 8:30 am to 7 pm, and many days from 10 pm to midnight. (With a few breaks for coffee, lunch, errands, etc., of course.)
With MS, they're gaping holes that we hear about because the worm actually did do the damage. The bugfixes for OpenSSH are all questions about bugs being found by reading the code, and nonstandard installations -- not known compromises. The speed with which security issues are handled is also much better than anything those yahoos ever do.
The fact that this kind of immature pablum gets moderated as "Insightful" is evidence of the decline of Slashdot into a morass of ill-informed juvenile political ranting.... Intellectual property is as real as the chair I'm sitting on.
Maybe in your country, but not in these United States of America. (Or is it because you use words like "pablum" and "histrionic" you think you are the arbiter of what constitutes decline?) We have copyrights; we have patents; we have trademarks and service-marks. We don't have anything called "intellectual property" -- for a very good reason. It's because copyrights, patents, trademarks etc. are all different. The only thing they have in common is that they are not property. You don't have property for a limited time period. You don't lose property through disuse.
So call copyrights, patents, trademarks, and whatever else you want to throw in that bag by their proper names. Completely different laws apply to copyrights and patents; they should not be lumped together. And if you do perform that intellectually bankrupt practice, do not co-opt a term that has a specific legal meaning.
Utopians fools are one thing; doctrinaire blowhards engaging in sophistry are another. This bogus "intellectual property" ugliness has nothing to do with "Everything Belongs to Everyone". Ownership of physical objects must be different from "ownership" of ideas; if I give someone an apple, I no longer have the use of that apple. If I share my idea with someone else, I still have the use of that idea. (Or, to use the words of a certain Founding Father, you can light another's candle without dousing your own.) If I want some benefit from that idea, I must execute it into something. There is a very good reason the laws of this country distinguish between copyrights, patents, and property.
The Pentagon's insane. No one else should launch any satellites without their approval? When did they become the Kings of space? We should be happy that control over space seems to be an alliance (even if an uneasy alliance) of nations. No one group has overwhelming power in space.
I'm about as staunch an anti-MS person as you could hope to find. However, a custom stripped-down version of Windows on controlled hardware is a very different beast to the crap you get in a typical home or office PC. All hardware is tightly controlled: attackers have to break in physically before they can do anything. The communication links and the encryption methods are regulated by the federales, so that is not significantly more or less secure than a non-Windows platform. If it's tightly controlled hardware doing exactly one thing only, you can make it as crash-proof as anything else.
It could be argued that Windows, with its "always on" window system, is not appropriate from a resource usage standpoint. But if some company has put together a system that complies with all the regs and can compete on price with other systems, why should a bank care what's inside the box?
Finally, the maintenance staff has "root-like" physical access to the system. Sure, you have to get past some heavy-duty locks to get to the control panel inside the machine.
This is not a Windows-only vulnerability. Give me physical access to anything and I can be root on it. Just boot it single-user (or whatever maintenance mode is appropriate for the sytem) -- voila! If I intend to rob ATMs, you think I'm not going to do any research on what kind of system I'm going to find inside, and how to compromise it? Anyone who can break into an ATM room is not a script kiddie, this is a serious burglar.
Apparently, these people forgot that all 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were young, middle-eastern men, so that's who they should be looking at the closest (aaaand duh).
Are you insane? If I were a multinational terrorist with excellent funding, you think I couldn't recruit and train a good ol' white guy from Kansas? Don't forget John Lindh.
There is no way to do this sort of security. The only thing that makes sense is to give all passengers a complete and thorough anal-probe-level search. Leave out any one group, and that's the group terrorists will select to get their next hijackers from. This means there is no perfect security in a free and rational society. So some rudimentary security to catch the wackos, like metal detectors, is fine; beyond that, the only rational thing to do is think long term: what makes some people want to do these things to us?
My friend works for the TSA and they've confiscated,..., drugs (LOTS of it, and not just pot either),
What the hell? I'm supposed to believe that taking that joint away from the pimply 16 year old stoner will make us all more safe? Jesus fucking Christ, this is insane. Why don't they just fingerprint all passengers and do criminal background checks? Does the phrase illegal search and seizure mean anything any more?
The problem is... kinetic energy only accounts for less than 9 percent of the energy in a geosynchronous orbit.
Er... that's kind of the point. And we were talking about LEO, not geosynchronous. Look at the math. There is no "The problem is...", I accounted for all the energy for LEO. I'm not surprised that if LEO requires 9 kWh/kg, then geosynchronous orbits need 16 kWh/kg. But we're talking about LEO.
Nonsense. Computers don't need monopolies. Monopolies (or near monopolies) lead to predatory business practices (cf. MS) and/or poor software since there's no competition (cf. MS). They also lead to monocultures, which lead to widespread worms and viruses (cf. guess who).
What we need are uniform standards and protocols. So, one IM protocol just like we have HTTP and HTML. You have your choice of clients and/or networks. That way MS and AOL can still keep bombarding their clients with ads, and people who are willing to undergo a little pain (installing a third-party client) can skip all that. You know, just like default MS users get screwed with IE, but if you install Mozilla or Opera you can block ads etc.
"If you got together with a few of your neighbors and each of you bought different CDs and then lent them to each other, that wouldn't even violate copyright."
Is this true?
This sometimes called the doctrine of first sale: after the record company (music store) sold you the CD, you can re-sell it, lend it to friends, etc. -- just like with a book. As long as you don't have a ripped file (or copy of the CD) that you're playing at the same time that you're friend is playing the CD, no copyright violation. (If you're not playing it at the same time as your friend, you may still be ok under the "one backup copy" provision, but that's less cut and dry.)
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it! Why have two or three media giants? Let's have just one, that will be the most efficient and lead to the least duplication of effort. Let's make it Fox "News" because animals attacking babies is important. That, and foxy boxing. All this choice and diversity annoys and confuses me.
This is a bug, not an exploit. There is no known exploit of this bug on OpenBSD. The message on the [Full-Disclosure] list only describes a Denial of Service attack -- flooding the target machines with connections is not ssh's problem.
Besides, what have they "swept under the carpet"? What do you mean "you have probably"?Just because you seem to have something personal with Theo going on, we're supposed to take your word for this "deceit"?
You're right, in that the numbers are finite and manageable. But they're still much bigger than the amounts of energy we normally throw around on Earth.
Not just finite, but ordinary. I'm trying to give a real-world idea of exactly how much energy we're talking about. Running a hair-dryer for 9 hours doesn't seem that much to me. At residential electric rates, 9 kWh costs about 50 cents (US). I don't know about you, but 50 cents per kg seems very cheap to me.
If you want to keep thinking in terms of cars: how much gas would you use to accelerate an average car from 0 to freeway speeds? Now multiply that by 35, and you still have a tiny amount. Another way to think about it: the energy in your average car's gas tank is enough to put 50 kg into orbit. You call that "much bigger than the amounts of energy we normally throw around on Earth"?
Your 1000 kg satellite would cost $500 to put up on a pure energy basis; it's expensive now because of the fact that chemical rockets are a really inefficient way to do it. Unfortunately that's the only way we have right now.
Even at 100% efficiency, it still takes a LOT of energy to reach orbit or beyond.
Hmmm... let's see, g = 9.8, earth radius is around 6400 km, so orbital velocity for LEO (low earth orbit) is sqrt(rg) = approx. 7 km/s. Call it 8 km/s for a stable orbit well outside the atmosphere. To put 1 kg into LEO it will take 1/2 mv^2 = 0.5 * 8e3 ^ 2, which is about 32e6 J. Or, to put it into everyday units, about 9 kWh (1 kWh = 36e5 J). A hair-dryer is about 1 kW, so it's the energy consumed by running a hair-dryer for 9 hours. Don't know what you mean by "LOT" but that doesn't seem a huge amount of energy to me. (If I remember right, escape velocity is around twice LEO velocity.)
An average car travelling down the freeway has about 9e5 J of kinetic energy (1500 kg car at 130 kph, approx. 3000 lbs. at 80 mph). The energy in 35 cars travelling on the freeway is enough to put 1 kg (2.2 lbs.) into orbit.
Your point about maturity is well taken, it looks quite likely that we'll either kill each other or poison our environment before space travel can become reality.
There are plenty of older aircraft in the fleet that are still using good ol' VOR/LOC/DME receivers for navigation. That's pure radio, no fancy digital doodads: VOR/LOC in VHF (around 110-120 MHz) and DME in UHF (around 300 MHz). Newer aircraft with fancy electronic doodads have multi-sensor nav systems, to which GPS is one input. Other systems like IRS (inertial nav.) and DME (and more rearely VOR) are also inputs to the nav. system. Redundancy and multiple independent sources for everything is the key to safety.
The FAA has no trust problems with GPS: WAAS is now in service, and many airports now have precision approaches -- i.e. they give the aircraft vertical guidance as well as lateral, so on an approach you can descend to around 400 feet above the ground using just GPS. ILS is the only other system in use that offers vertical guidance, and has been the standard approach system till now. Now GPS has precision approaches, and the plan is to improve that 400' descent to ILS-like descents, probably up to and including full autoland with LAAS. This will require a lot more fault-tolerance in the system, of course -- signal integrity, satellite geometry etc. (The FAA has already started phasing out VORs, and NDBs are almost all gone.)
GPS units are receivers (just like VOR/LOC/ADF), and can be jammed reasonably easily. The GPS signal is very low strength -- below the noise floor, and all satellites transmit on the same frequency so code-based spread-spectrum (like CDMA) is used.
You may draw your own conclusions as to whether or not GPS-only is a good way for civil aviation to go.
These are electronics, not nuclear reactors! You can't "insulate" the electronics, since they have to receive signals from the outside. They'd have to isolate the passenger cabin and/or make the avionics more interference-robust. Expensive in any case.
But we'd rather have passengers undress partially and put their clothes through the X-ray machine rather than deal with any real problems...
However, the services that will suffer the most are legacy data over voice lines, such as fax and modems.
That could be seen as a feature: the crappier the modem and fax quality is, the sooner people will move off them! (Although real-time fax with H.323 doesn't seem to be there yet, and apparently faxed documents are legally OK but scanned and emailed documents are not.)
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Besides, everyone knows Australia is inhabited by convicts, so what do they know about voting? And counting manually takes so much time, computers are instant!
As your signature quotes,
What do we call it when businesses control the government for the betterment of the people?
Why should efficiency at maximizing the economy be the standard of a good government? (Not that I have anything against growing and/or efficient economies... but why should it be the primary job of the government?)
Suits are very nervous about releasing anything that might be "our intellectual property." My job is to tell them honestly what the pros and cons are of using GPL'ed code; after that it's their decision. They are keenly aware of the cost savings involved if the schedule can be sped up by n weeks.
Another way I've done it is: parts of project Y will be helped by using GPL'ed code. But we don't want to release Y -- what to do? Split project Y into pieces y_i. Each piece is an executable that can run independently and does part of the job. Piece y_j uses GPL'ed code; we release the complete source to program y_j. Doing it this way has a side benefit: it forces you into a better design, that of individually testable modules.
If a company doesn't want to use the GPL, of course that's their choice -- and in that case they are not allowed to copy ("rip-off") GPL'ed code. As simple as that. You want to use the fruits of our hard work? Fine, as long as you play by our rules. TANSTAAFL -- the cost of copying GPL-ed code is that you must GPL your modifications/additions. You get to decide for yourself if that's a fair price.
Last I checked, Microsoft (or any other company) did not allow Linksys/Cisco to modify Windows for use in their routers for free. Why should we?
Open source ==> Open standards
Open standards =/=> Open standards
Therefore Open source != Open standards
The reporter unfortunately slanted the story as MS vs Linux. The state says it chose "open standards, including Linux" -- which seems to imply that it's closed standards that are taboo. If they're talking about file formats, network protocols etc. it is of course the sensible thing to do, since you're not vulnerable to losing your documents if the program is no longer supported, and you're not compelling everyone you communicate with to use exactly the same software as you do. Big difference between this and saying that they're only going to use Linux, which makes it seem as though they're retaliating against MS.
On the other hand, I find movement in movies very distracting because the image flashes painfully. Widescreen movies are the worst because your peripheral vision is more sensitive to movement. I think 24 fps for movies is too low, we should have a new cine standard with a higher frame rate. Maybe 36 fps.
Well, I can dream, can't I?
Someday they'll realise that if we just want to goof off, we can do that just as well at the office; working from home I'm usually at my desk from 8:30 am to 7 pm, and many days from 10 pm to midnight. (With a few breaks for coffee, lunch, errands, etc., of course.)
With MS, they're gaping holes that we hear about because the worm actually did do the damage. The bugfixes for OpenSSH are all questions about bugs being found by reading the code, and nonstandard installations -- not known compromises. The speed with which security issues are handled is also much better than anything those yahoos ever do.
So call copyrights, patents, trademarks, and whatever else you want to throw in that bag by their proper names. Completely different laws apply to copyrights and patents; they should not be lumped together. And if you do perform that intellectually bankrupt practice, do not co-opt a term that has a specific legal meaning.
Utopians fools are one thing; doctrinaire blowhards engaging in sophistry are another. This bogus "intellectual property" ugliness has nothing to do with "Everything Belongs to Everyone". Ownership of physical objects must be different from "ownership" of ideas; if I give someone an apple, I no longer have the use of that apple. If I share my idea with someone else, I still have the use of that idea. (Or, to use the words of a certain Founding Father, you can light another's candle without dousing your own.) If I want some benefit from that idea, I must execute it into something. There is a very good reason the laws of this country distinguish between copyrights, patents, and property.
The Pentagon's insane. No one else should launch any satellites without their approval? When did they become the Kings of space? We should be happy that control over space seems to be an alliance (even if an uneasy alliance) of nations. No one group has overwhelming power in space.
It could be argued that Windows, with its "always on" window system, is not appropriate from a resource usage standpoint. But if some company has put together a system that complies with all the regs and can compete on price with other systems, why should a bank care what's inside the box?
This is not a Windows-only vulnerability. Give me physical access to anything and I can be root on it. Just boot it single-user (or whatever maintenance mode is appropriate for the sytem) -- voila! If I intend to rob ATMs, you think I'm not going to do any research on what kind of system I'm going to find inside, and how to compromise it? Anyone who can break into an ATM room is not a script kiddie, this is a serious burglar.There is no way to do this sort of security. The only thing that makes sense is to give all passengers a complete and thorough anal-probe-level search. Leave out any one group, and that's the group terrorists will select to get their next hijackers from. This means there is no perfect security in a free and rational society. So some rudimentary security to catch the wackos, like metal detectors, is fine; beyond that, the only rational thing to do is think long term: what makes some people want to do these things to us?
What we need are uniform standards and protocols. So, one IM protocol just like we have HTTP and HTML. You have your choice of clients and/or networks. That way MS and AOL can still keep bombarding their clients with ads, and people who are willing to undergo a little pain (installing a third-party client) can skip all that. You know, just like default MS users get screwed with IE, but if you install Mozilla or Opera you can block ads etc.
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it! Why have two or three media giants? Let's have just one, that will be the most efficient and lead to the least duplication of effort. Let's make it Fox "News" because animals attacking babies is important. That, and foxy boxing. All this choice and diversity annoys and confuses me.
Besides, what have they "swept under the carpet"? What do you mean "you have probably"?Just because you seem to have something personal with Theo going on, we're supposed to take your word for this "deceit"?
If you want to keep thinking in terms of cars: how much gas would you use to accelerate an average car from 0 to freeway speeds? Now multiply that by 35, and you still have a tiny amount. Another way to think about it: the energy in your average car's gas tank is enough to put 50 kg into orbit. You call that "much bigger than the amounts of energy we normally throw around on Earth"?
Your 1000 kg satellite would cost $500 to put up on a pure energy basis; it's expensive now because of the fact that chemical rockets are a really inefficient way to do it. Unfortunately that's the only way we have right now.
An average car travelling down the freeway has about 9e5 J of kinetic energy (1500 kg car at 130 kph, approx. 3000 lbs. at 80 mph). The energy in 35 cars travelling on the freeway is enough to put 1 kg (2.2 lbs.) into orbit.
Your point about maturity is well taken, it looks quite likely that we'll either kill each other or poison our environment before space travel can become reality.
There are plenty of older aircraft in the fleet that are still using good ol' VOR/LOC/DME receivers for navigation. That's pure radio, no fancy digital doodads: VOR/LOC in VHF (around 110-120 MHz) and DME in UHF (around 300 MHz). Newer aircraft with fancy electronic doodads have multi-sensor nav systems, to which GPS is one input. Other systems like IRS (inertial nav.) and DME (and more rearely VOR) are also inputs to the nav. system. Redundancy and multiple independent sources for everything is the key to safety.
The FAA has no trust problems with GPS: WAAS is now in service, and many airports now have precision approaches -- i.e. they give the aircraft vertical guidance as well as lateral, so on an approach you can descend to around 400 feet above the ground using just GPS. ILS is the only other system in use that offers vertical guidance, and has been the standard approach system till now. Now GPS has precision approaches, and the plan is to improve that 400' descent to ILS-like descents, probably up to and including full autoland with LAAS. This will require a lot more fault-tolerance in the system, of course -- signal integrity, satellite geometry etc. (The FAA has already started phasing out VORs, and NDBs are almost all gone.)
GPS units are receivers (just like VOR/LOC/ADF), and can be jammed reasonably easily. The GPS signal is very low strength -- below the noise floor, and all satellites transmit on the same frequency so code-based spread-spectrum (like CDMA) is used.
You may draw your own conclusions as to whether or not GPS-only is a good way for civil aviation to go.
But we'd rather have passengers undress partially and put their clothes through the X-ray machine rather than deal with any real problems...