What an utterly assinine response. Was this a joke and I missed the humor?
If "Salk" were the name of a football player who scored a decisive goal in the last superbowl, pages about him would and should show up in a search result before those about that other Salk. That's because search result rankings are not supposed to represent the cosmic significance of their subjects in the history of humanity. They are supposed to represent what more people who enter those search terms are likely to be searching for.
It's entirely possible that more searchers are interested in nature photography than medical research. Get down off your high horse and get a grip.
[A privlege escalation vulnerability] doesn't prove that Mac OS X is "insecure"...
I beg to differ. This is precisely what it proves, if "insecure" is to have its normal meaning of "someone gets to do something that the system is designed not to allow him to do".
It's certainly true that the original ZDNet article was sensationalist and overly alarmist about the implications for Mac security. But by implying that the original contest is irrelevent for a typical Mac user and that his test will prove that Macs are secure, Dave Schroeder is being equally, if not more, misleading.
The original test showed that Macs are vulnernable to local privlege escalation. It is true that most Mac desktops users are not offering accounts to external users. But a great many of the attacks out in the real world today are luring attacks, where a local user is tricked into running an executable with his local user permissions. The original test shows that such a executable can successfully elevate its privliges and own the machine. This is very relevent to the typical Mac desktop user.
Dave's new test doesn't have a user on the machine randomly surfing the internet and clicking on any link that says "get yer naked pics here"! Instead, as he freely admits, he is really just testing apache and ssh security, which are rarely turned on a typical Mac desktop configuration. Of course, were a hacker to exploit a vulnerability in one of those services, he could presumably use the same privledge escalation attack that was used in the original test to own the machine.
One of the more interesting ideas about how to deal with luring attacks has actually come out of the Microsoft.NET Framework. In its security model, the permissons of on application don't depend just on the user that's running it, but also on the origin of the application, as defined by a signed certificate. This system has the potential to greatly improve security, but sadly most Windows applications are not yet managed, and most Windows machines are not yet configured to strictly limit which managed applications are allowed to do what.
I think you give rubber slightly sort shrift. The primary uses of oil are as inputs to engines and plastics. Certainly a lack of rubber components would cause an engine to fail as much as a lack of fuel. And while plastics don't contain rubber, rubber is an essential component in the industrial infrastructure that generates them. But which comodity is "more important" is ultimately subjective.
One really doesn't need to get all speculative to find alternatives to oil that become comparitively economic with rising oil prices. Coal, nuclear, wind and water are already there, although wind and water are hard to scale up. Once oil reaches $100/barrel, it becomes economic to extract oil from tar sand, which would mean Canada has more oil than Saudi Arabia; that source alone effectively doubles world oil reserves. At even higher prices, earth-bound and even space-based solar would become competitive. And I don't doubt that there are ideas not even yet thought of at prices beyond that. So yes, I am willng to bet on alternatives, and I consider that a quite safe bet.
But consider a hypothetical parallel universe in which there really was no alternative. No coal, wood, nuclear, hydro-electric, wind, solar or other source of energy besides burning oil. No way to get more oil from known reserves by spending money on extraction technology. Just a finite tank somewhere that will be empty in 20 years at the current rate of depletion. How should such a world react? You could take the position that they should create an oil-rationing bureaucracy, spend resources on conservationist ad campaigns, and attach a religious-moral significane to oil use. Or you could just take the position that the price will rise as different uses compete for the dwindiling supply, and that people will naturaly react by scaling back their uses in the way that optimizes their happiness, given their means, with no government action required. In my view, the second postion is exactly the right one.
The question of second-order effects is certainly an interesting one, but the particular scenario you cite is specious. What is important from an economic perspective is the real interest rate, not the nominal interest rate. Inflation just represents an irrelevent change in units. The real interest rate is determined by the interplay of the supply of savings and the demand for loans; you will find it considerably more difficult to draw a direct link between those markets and the price of oil.
In the 1970s when inflation shot up, and the nominal interest rate shot up with it, real interest rates were quite stable and historically average. Inflation did seem to cause a lot of psycological hand-wringing in that era, which did have a negative effect on the stock market; but that imbalance was unwound by gains in the 1980s and 1990s. Basically, the psycological effects were a historical blip that were eventually overcome by real factors.
That's a perfectly legitimate request. Let's start with a couple of examples of resources that have essentailly been exhausted, without causing civilization to regress to the stone age. Then we'll consider whether the general history of comodity prices supports my claim.
First, consider Tyrian purple, a dye obtained from a particular species of mollusk. For centruies, this was how anything was dyed purple. Eventually, as the species nearly went extinct, it became incredibly expensive to dye anything purple (which is why purple is considerd a royal color in many western civilizations). Eventually, the price of the dye got high enough that it became extremely profitable to develop synthetic purple dyes. One commercially successful synthetic replacement was mauve.
Nowdays, people have a hard time grasping that the dye industry was once among the most important parts of the economy, so let's turn for our next example to an industry for which that is still true: rubber. As rubber became more important, naturally occuring rubber trees were used up, and the price rose. Eventually it became profitable to create rubber plantations. But rubber plantations are expensive to run and work only in a very few parts of the world, and that didn't hold prices in check for long. Eventually, it became profitiable to develop sythetic rubber, which is used in almost all applications today. There is so little natural rubber left in the world, that it couldn't cover our use of rubber for even a year. But civilization continued right on.
I, however, made a more concrete claim than that a depleted resource would not cause economic chaos; I claimed that its price would change in a specific way. Comodity prices are highly volitile. And the price swings are not just short-term -- some last for decades. So it is difficult to parse out the underlying long-term trend. But if you did your best using the longest existing time-series for resource comidities (like copper, tin, iron, and oil), you would find that economic theory is wrong. But not in the way you might think. It's wrong because the real prices actually tend to go down.
There was a famous wager about resource prices between Julian Simon, an economist, and Paul Ehrlich, a doom-and-gloom futurologist who makes is living writing books about the imminent collapse of civilization due to overpopulation and resource exhaustion. In 1980, Simon bet Ehrlich $10k that the price of any commodity resource of his choosing would be lower in 1990. (Ehrlich had been claiming that commodity prices were going to shoot through the roof, and even that England would cease to exist by 2000.) Ehrlich choose his commodities, and Simon won.
Obviously, loosinig this public bet was very embarassing for the dooom-and-gloom crowd. But apparently it hasn't stopped them getting press coverage.
All that means is that what oil is left will be efficiently allocated by selling it at $20/gallon when it becomes scarce enough.
That's correct, and that's also just fine. At that price, most former oil users won't care, because they will have turned to more economic alternatives. (And if that primarily means nuclear power, you can be sure that the eco-freaks will still be whining that their favorite alternative power sources could be made economic with just a little more government subsididy.)
Also, if you think the U.S. is one of the best examples of a purely capitalistic system in the world, you're still living in the pre-Great Depression era. China's current economic policies make it _much_ more capitalistic than the U.S. (although not democratic) right now, including all the bad parts of capitalism like screwing over the poor people.
Okay, now that you got in your anti-capitalist rhetorical dig, perhaps you'd like to know the actual truth about the Chineese economy? The vast majority of Chineese still work in rural collectives. In the handfull of urban areas where the government has allowed capitalism to take root, living standards have shot up. But even in those areas, most industries experience a lot more political interference than in the U.S. The government still controls to whom banks lend and who may invest in public companies. It prevents the failure of a great many un-economic firms. Contracts are not enforced uniformly by the courts.
You can certainly point to saftey and environmental regulations in the U.S. that don't exist in China. But those regulations are, by and large, a set of ground rules that affect all players equally. In China, capricious interference in the markets for political ends is all too common.
I don't know about "peak oil theory" or othr poor attempts at economic modeling by geology professors, but if you ask an economist, he will tell you what economic theory predicts: a finite resource will be depleted at a rate such at, on average, its price rises at the interest rate. The only "exponential effects" are in the minds of the doom-sayers that the press likes to quote because they make for such great copy.
If Joe Sixpack feels that paying $5/gallon to run his $50k SUV represents the allocation of his money that optimizes his happiness, then let him! Why do you want to engineer some sort of adjustment of his preferences to ones you believe to be more appropriate?
(Disclaimer: I drive a 5-year-old car for which I paid about $15k and which gets about 20 miles/gallon.)
You don't say exactly what you want "us" to do after "we" have procrastinated so long, but from your tone I gather that you want some sort of coordinated action, probably involving the government. That is entirely unnecessary, and probably counter-productive. As oil becomes scarcer, prices will rise, and users will seek alternatives at the time that it becomes financially appropriate. Effecient, decentralized markets work well for all sorts of important comodities: foodstuffs, dyes, minerals,... It's the centrally planned ones that have failed miserably to efficiently provide for even the most basic needs.
I would just laugh off opinions like this one as the sentiments of someone who has no understanding of basic economics, but unfortunately there are enough people who think like this to way to convince politicians to screw with markets.
"I doubt it... So many places I know and so many people I know are running Netscape Navigator that I think it will take a long time, if it ever does occur, for people to switch over to Internet Explorer."
Your historical context is valuable, but it doesn't justify your claim that the whole idea of owning the rights to software is bunk. Let me provide a little more historical context.
Historically, there was never any legal notion that works in the public domain couldn't or shouldn't be used as the basis for propiratary works. If I take a novel in the public domain, I am free to write a sequel to it, using the same characters and settings, but not release my sequal into the public domain. Indeed, many legal theorists think the whole point of a public domain is to be a resource for propriatary endeavours.
Yes, the habbits of early computer enthusiasts were at variance with this notion of IP. But that could just as well mean that the early computer enthusiasts were wrong as that IP law is wrong. It certainly doesn't mean that Microsoft didn't have clear legal ownership rights of its software just because it was built on top of software in the public domain.
(The GPL is an attempt to create a new kind of public domain that does not allow works in it to be appropriated for propriatry use. But it's the GPL idea that's historically novel, not the idea that public domain works can serve as the basis for propriatary works.)
You're being funny, right? You don't really believe that psycobabble, right?
The West, since its emergence from the Dark ages, has been dominated by people who can evolve and adapt in order to get what they want. (As opposed to certain eastern parts of the world, which tried to seal their borders for 200 years in order to preserve their purity.) If there is some truth in your psycobabble, and the West really does need more "NT types" to compete, you can be damn sure we will start producing them.
This seems like a good move on the part of the Chineese. While information about a lot of "prestige engineering", like rockets and nuclear bombs, is locked up in U.S. and Russian government agencies, most fusion energy research has occured in the open in the international scientific community for the last 50 years. So the Chineese can start right away at the state-of-the-art, without having to re-discover all the stuff that we won't tell them. (Not that the state-of-the-art is really all that impressive. After 50 years we still don't have a sustained net-positive reaction.)
By the way, the people worring about some doomsday scenario can rest easy. The stored energy in a Tokamak isn't much different from the stored energy in a dam or nuclear reactor. (The energy density may be comparable to that in the sun, but the volume isn't so big.) So while you wouldn't want be standing next to the thing when it blew, once you get a few hundred kilometers away, the explosion wouldn't bother you too much.
Well, I certainly appreciate the time you and other have taken to address my annoyances list.
On a few points, I stand corrected. update-rc.d certainly does init script management, although as you say nothing produces a nice formated overview like RedHat's tools. And I mis-stated my problem with different package management front ends. I know I did have a problem -- perhaps apttitude didn't recognize a package installed with dpkg --set-selections, or didn't respect a pinning I had done with another tool -- I don't remember exactly how I got burnt, but I certainly didn't accurately descibe the issue in my post.
On OpenSSL and GPL, I think you are being a bit disinginuous. Many other distros with a lot more high-paid legal talent than Debian have concluded that the OS clause gives them a usable legal loophole. But instead of seeking to use the loophole to benefit its users, Debian sought ideological confrontation. Debian's attitude toward the binary-only nv drivers is another example. I spent a couple hours installing the binary driver and getting GL working just so my daughter could play penguin racer. Other distros would install it by default.
I don't know whether others distros have an adduser that functions as a shim for multiple NSS data stores, but I know I'm not the first "enterprise" admin to suggest it. The excuse that "it's not supposed to work that way" is a little weak. The sendmail command wasn't orginally supposed to be a shim over whatever email system you used, but Debian and other distros now make it one, because it's damn useful to do so.
Anyway, thanks again to all of you for responding.
I've used Debian for 5+ years, not just on a desktop but also as the basis of the distributed system of a medium-sized research laboratory. I've been mostly happy, but I'm becomming restless. Yeah, apt-get is really cool, but what about...
/etc/init.d/ scripts: Debian doesn't have a nice way to turn these scripts on and off and monitor their status via a command-line tool. Red Hat's system here was very good.
user management: I use LDAP for user management; others use SAMBA and other stuff. But adduser isn't a shim that can interface to any of these back-end data-stores -- it can only do/etc/passwd.
ideology: Debian's ideological bent can be a real pain for those us using the distro for its technical merits. For example, Debian pulled SSL support from all the GPL network services that link to libssl in a fit of ideology that no other distro has had.
package management: Yeah, apt-get's dependency resolution logic is very cool. Other aspects of the system aren't so cool. Apt-get, aptitude, and other front-ends don't share the same back-end data-store, so if you mix and match these tools, you get inconsistent package data. And it's nearly impossible to force-remove a package (just delete all the damn files and forget about it!) if the associated removal script fails.
You are welcome to go one all you like about how you like the Java standards story better than the.NET standards story, but you really need to stop making this demonstrably false claim about Mono's API coverage.
As you can see here, Mono covers about 98% of the v 1.1 (Everett) framework, which is what most shops still use. This is comparable to the JDK 1.5 implementation you just touted!
And as you can see here, Mono already covers about 90% of the just-released v 2.0 (Whidbey) framework.
And of course, these statistics leave out all the LDAP, GTK, CORBA, and other Unix-centric APIs that are in Mono but not in the.NET Framework.
Fundamentally, the reason we have no metric unit of time is that there are two lengths of time we really care about a lot -- the day and the year -- and they are not seperated by a power of 10.
Actually, those metric-crazy revolutionary Frenchmen did try it. They picked the day as the fundamental unit. They then divided the year into 12 30-day months, plus a 5-6 day party at the end.
In special relativity, the speed of light is a constant in all frames of reference. But special relativity only applies to non-accelerated frames.
In general relativity, the speed of light does vary in accelerated frames. And by extension, in frames with gravity, since general relativity requires that frames with gravity act just like accelerated frames.
In the 20s and 30s, a few people made fun of Einstein for first saying that the speed of light is a constant, then saying that gravity could change the speed of light.
Thanks for the correction. By history, I did mean future history, but I agree that I was not at all clear. And you are, of course, completely correct that the derivative of the field strength becomes infinite only at the singularity, not at the event horizon.
The article isn't very clear on why matter traveling rapidly toward a black hole would still take a long time to fall in. I assume they are refering to the gravitational time dilation effect. For someone looking from far away, clocks near the black hole appear to run slower, and in fact to stop at the event horizon. Conversely, someone falling into the black hole (ignoring for the moment that he would in fact be ripped apart by tidal forces) would see the entire history of the universe played out above himself as he fell in.
Thanks for replying. There are two of your points I'd like to respond to in particular.
Under this theory, if they can do any job for less, then they
will do ALL jobs for less... I am not so moronic that I cannot see that total replacement of all citizens by L1 visa workers living in corporate owned slums...
The argument that, without government intervention, workers would earn only starvation wages, dates back to Malthus. If it were true, it would apply with or without immigration. But it isn't true.
Any modern economist can draw you a bunch of nifty graphs that show that, in a competitive labor market, a worker will earn the marginal product of his labor. I encourage you to go take an econ class, because the mathematical logic of the argument is fun. But to see that it's true, all you have to do is look around at all the vast majority of workers in our cometitive labor markets who are earning far more than starvation wages.
Your grandfather or great grandfather may have died for your
country, but that doesn't matter anymore.
Sigh. Do you know the line about patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels?
I don't believe that my grandfather, who did in fact fight in WWII, served in order to protect native workers against competition. On the contrary, he believed that people should be judged on their merits and not on their country of origin.
An unmitigated deluge of skilled workers... can be devastating to the local economy.
Bzzzt! Return to Econ 101.
The local economy = everything produced locally. More skilled workers = more produced locally = economy grows.
Now, wihile said deluge certainly won't the devastate local economy, it certainly can devastate those displaced workers foolish enough to cling to the idea they are somehow owed a job in their former industry.
Slashdot Mirror
What an utterly assinine response. Was this a joke and I missed the humor?
If "Salk" were the name of a football player who scored a decisive goal in the last superbowl, pages about him would and should show up in a search result before those about that other Salk. That's because search result rankings are not supposed to represent the cosmic significance of their subjects in the history of humanity. They are supposed to represent what more people who enter those search terms are likely to be searching for.
It's entirely possible that more searchers are interested in nature photography than medical research. Get down off your high horse and get a grip.
I beg to differ. This is precisely what it proves, if "insecure" is to have its normal meaning of "someone gets to do something that the system is designed not to allow him to do".
It's certainly true that the original ZDNet article was sensationalist and overly alarmist about the implications for Mac security. But by implying that the original contest is irrelevent for a typical Mac user and that his test will prove that Macs are secure, Dave Schroeder is being equally, if not more, misleading.
The original test showed that Macs are vulnernable to local privlege escalation. It is true that most Mac desktops users are not offering accounts to external users. But a great many of the attacks out in the real world today are luring attacks, where a local user is tricked into running an executable with his local user permissions. The original test shows that such a executable can successfully elevate its privliges and own the machine. This is very relevent to the typical Mac desktop user.
Dave's new test doesn't have a user on the machine randomly surfing the internet and clicking on any link that says "get yer naked pics here"! Instead, as he freely admits, he is really just testing apache and ssh security, which are rarely turned on a typical Mac desktop configuration. Of course, were a hacker to exploit a vulnerability in one of those services, he could presumably use the same privledge escalation attack that was used in the original test to own the machine.
One of the more interesting ideas about how to deal with luring attacks has actually come out of the Microsoft .NET Framework. In its security model, the permissons of on application don't depend just on the user that's running it, but also on the origin of the application, as defined by a signed certificate. This system has the potential to greatly improve security, but sadly most Windows applications are not yet managed, and most Windows machines are not yet configured to strictly limit which managed applications are allowed to do what.
I think you give rubber slightly sort shrift. The primary uses of oil are as inputs to engines and plastics. Certainly a lack of rubber components would cause an engine to fail as much as a lack of fuel. And while plastics don't contain rubber, rubber is an essential component in the industrial infrastructure that generates them. But which comodity is "more important" is ultimately subjective.
One really doesn't need to get all speculative to find alternatives to oil that become comparitively economic with rising oil prices. Coal, nuclear, wind and water are already there, although wind and water are hard to scale up. Once oil reaches $100/barrel, it becomes economic to extract oil from tar sand, which would mean Canada has more oil than Saudi Arabia; that source alone effectively doubles world oil reserves. At even higher prices, earth-bound and even space-based solar would become competitive. And I don't doubt that there are ideas not even yet thought of at prices beyond that. So yes, I am willng to bet on alternatives, and I consider that a quite safe bet.
But consider a hypothetical parallel universe in which there really was no alternative. No coal, wood, nuclear, hydro-electric, wind, solar or other source of energy besides burning oil. No way to get more oil from known reserves by spending money on extraction technology. Just a finite tank somewhere that will be empty in 20 years at the current rate of depletion. How should such a world react? You could take the position that they should create an oil-rationing bureaucracy, spend resources on conservationist ad campaigns, and attach a religious-moral significane to oil use. Or you could just take the position that the price will rise as different uses compete for the dwindiling supply, and that people will naturaly react by scaling back their uses in the way that optimizes their happiness, given their means, with no government action required. In my view, the second postion is exactly the right one.
The question of second-order effects is certainly an interesting one, but the particular scenario you cite is specious. What is important from an economic perspective is the real interest rate, not the nominal interest rate. Inflation just represents an irrelevent change in units. The real interest rate is determined by the interplay of the supply of savings and the demand for loans; you will find it considerably more difficult to draw a direct link between those markets and the price of oil.
In the 1970s when inflation shot up, and the nominal interest rate shot up with it, real interest rates were quite stable and historically average. Inflation did seem to cause a lot of psycological hand-wringing in that era, which did have a negative effect on the stock market; but that imbalance was unwound by gains in the 1980s and 1990s. Basically, the psycological effects were a historical blip that were eventually overcome by real factors.
That's a perfectly legitimate request. Let's start with a couple of examples of resources that have essentailly been exhausted, without causing civilization to regress to the stone age. Then we'll consider whether the general history of comodity prices supports my claim.
First, consider Tyrian purple, a dye obtained from a particular species of mollusk. For centruies, this was how anything was dyed purple. Eventually, as the species nearly went extinct, it became incredibly expensive to dye anything purple (which is why purple is considerd a royal color in many western civilizations). Eventually, the price of the dye got high enough that it became extremely profitable to develop synthetic purple dyes. One commercially successful synthetic replacement was mauve.
Nowdays, people have a hard time grasping that the dye industry was once among the most important parts of the economy, so let's turn for our next example to an industry for which that is still true: rubber. As rubber became more important, naturally occuring rubber trees were used up, and the price rose. Eventually it became profitable to create rubber plantations. But rubber plantations are expensive to run and work only in a very few parts of the world, and that didn't hold prices in check for long. Eventually, it became profitiable to develop sythetic rubber, which is used in almost all applications today. There is so little natural rubber left in the world, that it couldn't cover our use of rubber for even a year. But civilization continued right on.
I, however, made a more concrete claim than that a depleted resource would not cause economic chaos; I claimed that its price would change in a specific way. Comodity prices are highly volitile. And the price swings are not just short-term -- some last for decades. So it is difficult to parse out the underlying long-term trend. But if you did your best using the longest existing time-series for resource comidities (like copper, tin, iron, and oil), you would find that economic theory is wrong. But not in the way you might think. It's wrong because the real prices actually tend to go down.
There was a famous wager about resource prices between Julian Simon, an economist, and Paul Ehrlich, a doom-and-gloom futurologist who makes is living writing books about the imminent collapse of civilization due to overpopulation and resource exhaustion. In 1980, Simon bet Ehrlich $10k that the price of any commodity resource of his choosing would be lower in 1990. (Ehrlich had been claiming that commodity prices were going to shoot through the roof, and even that England would cease to exist by 2000.) Ehrlich choose his commodities, and Simon won.
Obviously, loosinig this public bet was very embarassing for the dooom-and-gloom crowd. But apparently it hasn't stopped them getting press coverage.
That's correct, and that's also just fine. At that price, most former oil users won't care, because they will have turned to more economic alternatives. (And if that primarily means nuclear power, you can be sure that the eco-freaks will still be whining that their favorite alternative power sources could be made economic with just a little more government subsididy.)
Also, if you think the U.S. is one of the best examples of a purely capitalistic system in the world, you're still living in the pre-Great Depression era. China's current economic policies make it _much_ more capitalistic than the U.S. (although not democratic) right now, including all the bad parts of capitalism like screwing over the poor people.Okay, now that you got in your anti-capitalist rhetorical dig, perhaps you'd like to know the actual truth about the Chineese economy? The vast majority of Chineese still work in rural collectives. In the handfull of urban areas where the government has allowed capitalism to take root, living standards have shot up. But even in those areas, most industries experience a lot more political interference than in the U.S. The government still controls to whom banks lend and who may invest in public companies. It prevents the failure of a great many un-economic firms. Contracts are not enforced uniformly by the courts.
You can certainly point to saftey and environmental regulations in the U.S. that don't exist in China. But those regulations are, by and large, a set of ground rules that affect all players equally. In China, capricious interference in the markets for political ends is all too common.
I don't know about "peak oil theory" or othr poor attempts at economic modeling by geology professors, but if you ask an economist, he will tell you what economic theory predicts: a finite resource will be depleted at a rate such at, on average, its price rises at the interest rate. The only "exponential effects" are in the minds of the doom-sayers that the press likes to quote because they make for such great copy.
If Joe Sixpack feels that paying $5/gallon to run his $50k SUV represents the allocation of his money that optimizes his happiness, then let him! Why do you want to engineer some sort of adjustment of his preferences to ones you believe to be more appropriate?
(Disclaimer: I drive a 5-year-old car for which I paid about $15k and which gets about 20 miles/gallon.)
You don't say exactly what you want "us" to do after "we" have procrastinated so long, but from your tone I gather that you want some sort of coordinated action, probably involving the government. That is entirely unnecessary, and probably counter-productive. As oil becomes scarcer, prices will rise, and users will seek alternatives at the time that it becomes financially appropriate. Effecient, decentralized markets work well for all sorts of important comodities: foodstuffs, dyes, minerals,... It's the centrally planned ones that have failed miserably to efficiently provide for even the most basic needs.
I would just laugh off opinions like this one as the sentiments of someone who has no understanding of basic economics, but unfortunately there are enough people who think like this to way to convince politicians to screw with markets.
From the same school of thought, circa 1995:
"I doubt it... So many places I know and so many people I know are running Netscape Navigator that I think it will take a long time, if it ever does occur, for people to switch over to Internet Explorer."
Your historical context is valuable, but it doesn't justify your claim that the whole idea of owning the rights to software is bunk. Let me provide a little more historical context.
Historically, there was never any legal notion that works in the public domain couldn't or shouldn't be used as the basis for propiratary works. If I take a novel in the public domain, I am free to write a sequel to it, using the same characters and settings, but not release my sequal into the public domain. Indeed, many legal theorists think the whole point of a public domain is to be a resource for propriatary endeavours.
Yes, the habbits of early computer enthusiasts were at variance with this notion of IP. But that could just as well mean that the early computer enthusiasts were wrong as that IP law is wrong. It certainly doesn't mean that Microsoft didn't have clear legal ownership rights of its software just because it was built on top of software in the public domain.
(The GPL is an attempt to create a new kind of public domain that does not allow works in it to be appropriated for propriatry use. But it's the GPL idea that's historically novel, not the idea that public domain works can serve as the basis for propriatary works.)
Let me be the first to say...
NOOOOOOO!
You're being funny, right? You don't really believe that psycobabble, right?
The West, since its emergence from the Dark ages, has been dominated by people who can evolve and adapt in order to get what they want. (As opposed to certain eastern parts of the world, which tried to seal their borders for 200 years in order to preserve their purity.) If there is some truth in your psycobabble, and the West really does need more "NT types" to compete, you can be damn sure we will start producing them.
This seems like a good move on the part of the Chineese. While information about a lot of "prestige engineering", like rockets and nuclear bombs, is locked up in U.S. and Russian government agencies, most fusion energy research has occured in the open in the international scientific community for the last 50 years. So the Chineese can start right away at the state-of-the-art, without having to re-discover all the stuff that we won't tell them. (Not that the state-of-the-art is really all that impressive. After 50 years we still don't have a sustained net-positive reaction.)
By the way, the people worring about some doomsday scenario can rest easy. The stored energy in a Tokamak isn't much different from the stored energy in a dam or nuclear reactor. (The energy density may be comparable to that in the sun, but the volume isn't so big.) So while you wouldn't want be standing next to the thing when it blew, once you get a few hundred kilometers away, the explosion wouldn't bother you too much.
Well, I certainly appreciate the time you and other have taken to address my annoyances list.
On a few points, I stand corrected. update-rc.d certainly does init script management, although as you say nothing produces a nice formated overview like RedHat's tools. And I mis-stated my problem with different package management front ends. I know I did have a problem -- perhaps apttitude didn't recognize a package installed with dpkg --set-selections, or didn't respect a pinning I had done with another tool -- I don't remember exactly how I got burnt, but I certainly didn't accurately descibe the issue in my post.
On OpenSSL and GPL, I think you are being a bit disinginuous. Many other distros with a lot more high-paid legal talent than Debian have concluded that the OS clause gives them a usable legal loophole. But instead of seeking to use the loophole to benefit its users, Debian sought ideological confrontation. Debian's attitude toward the binary-only nv drivers is another example. I spent a couple hours installing the binary driver and getting GL working just so my daughter could play penguin racer. Other distros would install it by default.
I don't know whether others distros have an adduser that functions as a shim for multiple NSS data stores, but I know I'm not the first "enterprise" admin to suggest it. The excuse that "it's not supposed to work that way" is a little weak. The sendmail command wasn't orginally supposed to be a shim over whatever email system you used, but Debian and other distros now make it one, because it's damn useful to do so.
Anyway, thanks again to all of you for responding.
I've used Debian for 5+ years, not just on a desktop but also as the basis of the distributed system of a medium-sized research laboratory. I've been mostly happy, but I'm becomming restless. Yeah, apt-get is really cool, but what about...
/etc/init.d/ scripts: Debian doesn't have a nice way to turn these scripts on and off and monitor their status via a command-line tool. Red Hat's system here was very good.
user management: I use LDAP for user management; others use SAMBA and other stuff. But adduser isn't a shim that can interface to any of these back-end data-stores -- it can only do /etc/passwd.
ideology: Debian's ideological bent can be a real pain for those us using the distro for its technical merits. For example, Debian pulled SSL support from all the GPL network services that link to libssl in a fit of ideology that no other distro has had.
package management: Yeah, apt-get's dependency resolution logic is very cool. Other aspects of the system aren't so cool. Apt-get, aptitude, and other front-ends don't share the same back-end data-store, so if you mix and match these tools, you get inconsistent package data. And it's nearly impossible to force-remove a package (just delete all the damn files and forget about it!) if the associated removal script fails.
Wow, I'm so impressed to actually have an intelligent give-and-take discussion on slashdot. Thanks!
Mono provides only a small subset of .NET.
You are welcome to go one all you like about how you like the Java standards story better than the .NET standards story, but you really need to stop making this demonstrably false claim about Mono's API coverage.
As you can see here, Mono covers about 98% of the v 1.1 (Everett) framework, which is what most shops still use. This is comparable to the JDK 1.5 implementation you just touted!
And as you can see here, Mono already covers about 90% of the just-released v 2.0 (Whidbey) framework.
And of course, these statistics leave out all the LDAP, GTK, CORBA, and other Unix-centric APIs that are in Mono but not in the .NET Framework.
Fundamentally, the reason we have no metric unit of time is that there are two lengths of time we really care about a lot -- the day and the year -- and they are not seperated by a power of 10.
Actually, those metric-crazy revolutionary Frenchmen did try it. They picked the day as the fundamental unit. They then divided the year into 12 30-day months, plus a 5-6 day party at the end.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
You are wrong. But in a very understandable way.
In special relativity, the speed of light is a constant in all frames of reference. But special relativity only applies to non-accelerated frames.
In general relativity, the speed of light does vary in accelerated frames. And by extension, in frames with gravity, since general relativity requires that frames with gravity act just like accelerated frames.
In the 20s and 30s, a few people made fun of Einstein for first saying that the speed of light is a constant, then saying that gravity could change the speed of light.
Thanks for the correction. By history, I did mean future history, but I agree that I was not at all clear. And you are, of course, completely correct that the derivative of the field strength becomes infinite only at the singularity, not at the event horizon.
The article isn't very clear on why matter traveling rapidly toward a black hole would still take a long time to fall in. I assume they are refering to the gravitational time dilation effect. For someone looking from far away, clocks near the black hole appear to run slower, and in fact to stop at the event horizon. Conversely, someone falling into the black hole (ignoring for the moment that he would in fact be ripped apart by tidal forces) would see the entire history of the universe played out above himself as he fell in.
Thanks for replying. There are two of your points I'd like to respond to in particular.
Under this theory, if they can do any job for less, then they will do ALL jobs for less... I am not so moronic that I cannot see that total replacement of all citizens by L1 visa workers living in corporate owned slums ...
The argument that, without government intervention, workers would earn only starvation wages, dates back to Malthus. If it were true, it would apply with or without immigration. But it isn't true.
Any modern economist can draw you a bunch of nifty graphs that show that, in a competitive labor market, a worker will earn the marginal product of his labor. I encourage you to go take an econ class, because the mathematical logic of the argument is fun. But to see that it's true, all you have to do is look around at all the vast majority of workers in our cometitive labor markets who are earning far more than starvation wages.
Your grandfather or great grandfather may have died for your country, but that doesn't matter anymore.
Sigh. Do you know the line about patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels?
I don't believe that my grandfather, who did in fact fight in WWII, served in order to protect native workers against competition. On the contrary, he believed that people should be judged on their merits and not on their country of origin.
An unmitigated deluge of skilled workers ... can be devastating to the local economy.
Bzzzt! Return to Econ 101.
The local economy = everything produced locally. More skilled workers = more produced locally = economy grows.
Now, wihile said deluge certainly won't the devastate local economy, it certainly can devastate those displaced workers foolish enough to cling to the idea they are somehow owed a job in their former industry.