Unfortunately, no amount of secure programming will prevent the user from installing an application that purports to be the greatest thing they need and have to install it RIGHT NOW. Of course, they do it.
Whatever security exists, it is now gone. I assure you that no system can withstand a determined user. Linux with SELInux cannot help - the user will simply turn it off when instructed to do so. If software can be installed on the computer by an idiot, there is no security.
What would the possible marketing effects of having a public deal with Microsoft be for Novell? Would you not expect that they would exploit any such deal based on interoperability? Of course they are going to market it that way.
This is an obvious marketing approach that was visible with the first mention of a deal with Microsoft.
The elderly would suffer the most from a universal healthcare system in the US. Right now, most healthcare spending is in the last year or so of life. There is also a spike for newborns, mostly preemies and drug-addicted babies.
If we get universal healthcare in the US, we're going to have to have an age-based cutoff like other countries do. Sorry, no treatment if you are over 70 or something like that. I don't see the AARP and similar groups going for that and they are a pretty substantial voting block.
With the telco's goes the backbone that is the Internet today. Yes, there is a significant chance that people will use the infrastructure without paying telephone rates and this will absolutely doom the current infrastructure. Then the cable companies will be faced with a situation where there isn't anything to connect them to anyone else left.
Similarly, when the infrastructure gets turned off WiFi providers aren't going to be connected either.
Do you think the government is going to step in and take over ownership of the fiber backbones? I don't see that happening. Since there is almost no revenue in operating the fiber backbone infrastructure it is also unlikely someone will run in and pick up the infrastructure to rescue it - it is going to die. Maybe Google will have enough fiber they own to continue the Internet without anyone else. Maybe not.
VOIP certainly stands to kill off the revenue that is supporting the current infrastructure.
The problem isn't Verizon deciding to block "some" messages they do not like. The issue is that Verizon is blocking messages constantly. From advertisers that want to assail your cell phone with text messages. Sure, Verizon could allow it all with a minor change in policy. Then you would get text messages just like you get spam - 24x7 constant mortgage offers, pseudo-pharmacies and male enhancement products.
No, Verizon and all of the other carriers are doing a great job at blocking the sending of text messages. Just because you aren't hearing about all of the blocking they are doing doesn't mean they are not turning down people every day.
Today the carriers choose what outside text messages to allow into the system. If you want to set up a system to send text messages to lots and lots of people, you need to deal with the carrier and they will ask you what you are sending. And filter agreements based on this.
Failure to do this will clearly result in text messaging being used for advertising. Lots of advertising because it is both (a) cheap for people that sign up with the carrier and (b) a revenue source because they charge people to receive these messages.
If the carrier were to make it open for anyone to send bulk text messages to people they would have to allow text messages to be filtered. They do not today. You can turn off text messages altogether but you cannot discriminate between sources of them. Such discrimination would fly in the face of the agreements they have with bulk senders.
So you want openness? You want to remove the filtering that the carriers are doing today? I don't think so.
In Chicago they have gangs. Gangs that recruit from school yards. Gangs that have "community breakfasts" where they get people together to show what good things the gang is doing in the community. Activities sanctioned by the city in parallel with shakedowns, drug sales, street battles with automatic weapons, and other sorts of things you would expect.
The police know who is in the gang and who the leaders are. Arresting them is pointless because nobody is going to testify and sending a gang leader to jail means he no longer has to fear being shot by rivals - it does nothing to remove him from active control of the gang. Can't lock up the entire gang because that would be racist - we would be punishing black people because they are black. The "gang" part of it gets lost in translation somehow.
Chicago is a haven for gangs, gang violence and whatnot. There are some places where the gang is far more in control of the city than the police are. Putting a camera in these locations has been the current strategy because the police then do not have to have a manned presence there. Someone can sit and watch the camera rather than sitting in a patrol car in the area. They might be shot if they were caught loitering in gang territory.
Yes, there are other places in Chicago where the gangs do not rule. There are no cameras there. There are tourists, restaurants, movie theaters and so on and so forth.
Chicago is hardly unique in US cities. New York and LA also have the same issues. Chicago is just the first place where the police are often in active retreat from gang territory replacing manned presence with cameras. To watch as the neighborhood descends even further.
Nonsense. Do you understand what the output of such a generator would be?
I believe it is very high voltage with not-so-much current. Well over 100,000 volts.
The separation between the output terminals would be larger than the space occupied by the car.
OK, what if I'm wrong and it is lots and lots of current. At 1200MW the output current would require something that isn't going to fit in a car to connect to the output terminals.
Either way, it isn't fitting in the space of a car. Not even an Excursion.
This is the same thinking that says if you ignore a bully he will leave you alone. Wrong. He will escalate.
The problem with cyberbullying is that the victim doesn't have to respond in any way. Everyone else discovers the lies, half-truths and photos and comes to their own conclusions. Expect this to come up in 10 years or so when people start finding out they can't get a job because someone in 7th grade posted a (fake) picture of them having sex with a goat.
How many video's get uploaded to Google Video (or YouTube) every day? Well, there are a whole lot of people that are potentially uploading. Lots and lots. Let's put the number at 1,000 a day even though I think that is far, far too low.
Now we have a company that owns the copyright on a popular movie. They might be able to justify 4 people to look at video sharing sites for infringement so they can then request the hosting site to remove it. Let's assume there are no more than 10 such video sharing sites, each with an average of no more than 1,000 posters each day. I suspect these numbers are way, way too low but even so this means there are 10,000 new video uploads that must be reviewed each day, seven days a week, or you fall behind.
This is the situation that the DMCA has created. It was originally envisioned that there would be a small number of "web site maintainers" and there would be only a limited amount of new material. We now have user contribution web sites and the full force of the tsunami of such contributions. This wasn't what the originators of DMCA envisioned at all.
Face it, there is no way to keep up. The video sharing sites aren't going to police the content because it would make contributions more difficult. The copyright owners can't check everything every day without a lot more people being involved and getting paid for it. And nobody has any respect for copyright or copyright owners so it could never be a "community policing" effort. Almost everyone wants to see copyright infringment continue on and on, unabated.
User contributions which can be infringing encourage this sort of thing. There would not seem to be any solution to the problem other than just giving up. I fully expect to see people starting to get the message soon, and that will mean no more digitial distribution. If you don't have the DVD to rip, you can't redistribute it. If you have a movie that is a big hit why would you throw it all away by making a DVD so it can be pirated? The other alternative is just saying "bag it" and not bothering to make the movie in the first place because you know you aren't going to get a fraction of the revenue you would have pre-piracy days.
I also think you will start seeing wider commercial distribution of less professional movies. They are cheaper and could be put on TV for next to nothing. If you can't get 100 million dollars for a movie, maybe you will want to show one on late-night TV that only cost $5000 to make.
Today, it is possible to replace the operating system on any purchased computer. Computer manufacturers and small computer shops putting custom computers together can put any operating system on a computer they choose. Dell is shipping a very, very small number of Linux systems as proof of this.
Still it is difficult to find someone that did not purchase Windows with their computer or replaced it after they got it. Linux is free and has a consumer penetration of something like 0.001% so it cannot be about cost.
It is possible, although difficult, to get OS X working on a generic Intel box. Nobody is doing this on any significant scale.
Face it, if some goverrment decided to tell Microsoft and computer manufacturers how to run their business the result would not be much different. People would be running Windows. Why? Because there is significant benefits to having a common base of software and user experience. Neither are really possible with a mix of operating systems.
There are companies with mixed Macintosh and Windows systems, but not very many. And the interoperability between the two is pretty low - they like to keep the Macs in the graphic arts department and Windows everywhere else. The few that try to interoperate generally succeed only because their close interaction is limited. Yes, virtual PC software helps - which clearly makes this point. Mixing different systems interoperably is difficult and leads to the need to run the same software.
Windows has some problems, but most of these are caused by the user in ways that can be clearly understood. Fixing a lot of these problems is difficult because it would restrict how the computer could be used. A lot of these problems exist to a lesser extent on OS X because the system is considerably less flexible in how the user experience can be changed.
I don't see the point to a government mandate such as this. It wouldn't really change anything. Nor would it help anyone economically. It would not make Linux a consumer operating system.
Nice try. You are correct that distributing DC is inefficient but not for the reasons you mention.
DC is incredibily difficult to change voltages with compared to AC. Sure, there are DC-to-DC converters but if you look inside that black box you will discover it is transformed into AC and back into DC with pretty big losses. This isn't done unless there is some overwhelming reason to do it.
There is no difference in the wire between AC and DC, even over long distances. There are no additional losses with DC. Resistance is resistance and it is the same between DC and AC. With AC you also have impedence which isn't a factor with DC. Because of impedence, over very long distances actually make AC less efficient in a transmission line. However, it was DC you couldn't use a transformer. So even though AC does incur some complications, DC is out of the question because (again) the inability to change the voltage.
Safety? DC was originally touted as being safer (by Edison) than AC as a criticism of Tesla. Edison was winning for a while but eventually lost out because Tesla was correct about distribution issues. I think at house current voltages a claim can be made either way and it is difficult to say which is safer. Both cause nasty effects on humans.
Superconducting distribution wouldn't change the situation between AC and DC either.
The reason we have AC today isn't losses or safety - it is transformers. Not the little ones in power cubes but the big ones out at the substation. The little ones might be replaced by switching power supplies, but the big ones aren't going anywhere.
The one smart move might be to change from 60Hz to 400Hz. It makes for smaller transformers, smaller capacitors (the other big thing at electric substations) and smaller filter capacitors in power supplies. Lots more efficient overall. Very hard to change the infrastructure that is built around 60hZ though.
This would seem to outlaw the collection of information in the course of purchasing products using credit cards.
I am going to have to review this to see if it is legally permissible to sell things to Canadian residents. I think it is entirely possible that all purchase records need to be purged to eliminate the data held to allow product updates and such.
Holding on to information to permit updates to products may be illegal under this law. This would make it impossible to add fixes to Microsoft products, or to process subscriptions for products like Norton Antivirus.
If people do not want information held by companies, absolutely their wishes should be respected. However, when such wishes are codified into laws companies should take the most draconian view possible of how these laws could be enforced. Under no circumstances should any requests "please keep my information" be granted. Any form of commerce that requires information should be kept should be blocked for countries with laws like this.
Certainly, any US company should not process credit card transactions from Canadian residents because this might allow sensative financial information to fall into the hands of other US companies, the US government or identity thieves exploiting the insecure nature of the US credit card processing companies.
For Canadians I would offer advice: cash only.
For all US businesses which deal with consumers in Canada it would seem impossible to now assure such consumers that their information cannot be disclosed through either security breaches and/or government action. Therefore, any information supplied to a US company violates the Canadian privacy laws. It would not surpise me that Canadians could be charged with violating this law if they supply anyone's information (including their own) to a US company.
Who tells the registry that the number has been disconnected? Unlike earlier centuries, there is no "the phone company". You get phone numbers from all sorts of people, some of which have little or nothing in the way of infrastructure.
The timeout method of recycling numbers is probably the only practical way to do it.
There is this little thing that some people like to refer to as "diversity". In some ways, it means catering to minorities and in others is means broader cultural vision.
Today, there is a cable/satellite channel dedicated to running old movies. How many people actually watch that enough to justify paying for such a channel? Damn few. How about a cable channel dedicated to television shows with Black actors? Today, there are more than one of these and considering both the number of people interested in such channels and their disposable income, it is doubtful that such channels would survive.
Sure, there would be plenty of people supporting the mainstream pablum that is on USA and FX. Movies with every questionable word silenced or redubbed. SciFi channel might survive, but it has a rather narrow appeal.
Unfortunately, the money required to operate an enterprise as a cable/satellite channel is pretty high. Today, if your offering gets picked up by cable systems you can operate and if not, every goes home to find something else to do. It isn't cheap to do this and it isn't going to be cheap in the future. This means that anything marginal or not clearly focused on the mainstream entertainment experience is going to go by the wayside.
I would miss the SciFi channel. I would miss TVLand and AMC (old movies). But my purchasing these channels on an ala carte basis would not be anywhere near enough to keep them operating.
Ala Carte is a method by which the larger media organizations get to push their message at everyone even more consistently than they can today. Anyone without a dedicated majority of the viewers loses. This has already happened with radio - there are few formats today and they all have mass appeal. Anything for smaller audiences is gone. Ala Carte cable will have exactly the same effect.
So this is the real problem with poverty in the world? It is the collective debt that is owed to the masters by the peons that just keeps accumulating with each generation?
Wow, I guess if this is true then the world really does need to have these debt-hording masters taken down a peg or two. No wonder there was a minor dispute with the government of England that caused the colonies to break away. Sounds like it is about time for the rest of the world to follow suit if everyone is held up in ancestral debt. Probably the best thing we could do in Iraq would be to destroy the bank records to free these people from their debt.
Your description was a little vague... is everyone held to ancestral debt except the US? Wow. That would probably account for all sorts of things, like people dying to emigrate to the US, consistent poverty world-wide, and a general distrust of those not held in thrall to this ancestral debt.
You go into the store, you are now a potential shoplifter. There is no (good) way to tell if the person leaving the store is in fact a shoplifter or not. The store has a choice - they can treat everyone as a potential shoplifter or not. That is pretty much the limit. Notice I'm not saying they can treat everyone as a shoplifter-in-fact, just a potential shoplifter.
You go to a donut shop and they are unlikely to check your bag on the way out. You go to a store where they sell tiny, valuable items and they are very, very likely to check your bag on the way out.
The other alternative is all merchandise is locked away and the store simply fetches stuff from the locked-away-room upon request. Some places operate this way today because of theft. Jewelry stores have a slightly different approach to the same problem, but it is all about small easily-stolen items of high value.
Face it, the US is a den of thieves. Shoplifting in many places runs to as high as 10% of the patrons. This means that there are so many actual shoplifters each day that they have to do something about the problem. If people didn't steal there would be a lot less security. Do you think the store likes spending money on cameras, theft deterrence systems, receipt checkers and the like? Do you think they are doing it just to hassle people?
I can't imagine Dell requiring open-source drivers. Even if to support their Linux offerings.
The problem isn't the lack of drivers, it is what the Chinese will do with an open-source driver. Hardware manufacturer spends lots of time (read: money) developing software-instead-of-hardware approach to make a given computer peripherial lower cost to the consumer. After all, software engineering is a non-reoccuring expense whereas if you put it in the hardware you get to just keep buying the chips. Today, they keep that software-instead-of-hardware a secret and get paid for their product.
You release the hardware specs (or better yet, a real working driver) and you now enable somebody to duplicate all that work in a couple of weeks just reusing (yes, stealing) the software. No R&D time. Much, much cheaper product.
So, are you going to buy the $100 item or the $50 one? Without some kind of protection against the open theft and import of cheap knock-offs manufacturing in the West is doomed. Today, there is no protection. Who do you think wrote the software in the $29 DVD player? You don't actually believe it was written in China, do you? How about that DVD writer that cost $49? Where did the firmware come from?
The problem is nobody really knows what is significant. So, they are scooping up whatever information they can find with the hope that someday there will be an important correlation.
Could this be used for other purposes? Probably not, because of the volume of the information and what it is going to take to really get down and start mining it.
The biggest single problem in the US today is there are indeed terrorists and we have had some incidents blocked. But almost no information about what has been blocked has leaked out. So everyone thinks it is all nonsense. As some people have mentioned, it would be the best thing all around if 3 or 4 indicidents were not blocked and successfully killed hundreds of people. Better yet, if a bunch of foreign nationals got blown up at the same time. Perhaps people would realize there is a problem and we're not anywhere near as isolated as we were in 1850.
So when would all this collected information be of value? After something big happens. What if it doesn't? What if everything is successfully (and secretly) blocked in the planning stages as it has been so far? Any program like this would be considered foolish and pointless, and invasion of everyone's privacy for no gain whatsoever.
But let one incident happen and the newsmedia will be all over the government for "not doing something." Today the criticism is for doing seemingly pointless things when still nobody can figure out what would be (a) acceptable and (b) useful. Would El Al style interrogations before boarding a plane produce useful results? Probably not - we're not looking for hijackers now. What we are certainly going to see is some kind of different attack vector. What would be useful to know about the (dead) perpetrators of that event? I don't think anybody knows.
The other approach that doesn't have much favor in the US government right now is to treat terrorism-related attacks like a tornado. It just happens and messes up a lot of stuff but there isn't anything that can be done about it. As far as I know, no government is taking that attitude - certainly not UK, Germany or Israel where attacks have ocurred. Would this work in the US? Sure - until the first attack. It is difficult to play the role of standing up and saying "it just happens" to a crying mother/father/brother/sister on TV. So incredibly difficult that no elected or unelected member of the government is ever going to do it.
The price of anything is determined by the lowest price that the item can be had for. What the Internet does is destroy most ability for price discrimination.
Where at one time you could dig through catalogs, classified ads and lots of other stuff trying to find a low price today it is much simpler. What the school book store does is have everything where you can put your hand on it vs. placing and order and getting it later. Many net-savvy people are deciding that the immediacy of having an item isn't as important as the price. This is facilitated by price search tools and pricing consolidation tools.
You also have criminal enterprises able to sell stuff at a fraction of the manufacturer's price. This is uncommon for textbooks but getting more and more common with other stuff. Today, anything of high value and low volume can be found on the Internet from black and gray market dealers, usually at less than 50% of the manufacturer's list price. Why not if you can steal it and resell it without much chance of getting caught? You can worry about the ethics of it after the first few million.
The problem is you are trading low price for locality and service. It also clearly pushes everything towards the Wal-Mart mentality of low, low prices at any cost. No "brick and mortar" store is going to be able to compete with near-slave-labor-wage warehouses and criminal enterprises. We are going to see the idea of the local store (of any type) go the way of the corner drug store.
The value of examining something before you buy will be lost in the mad rush for the lowest price.
Sorry, but we have long ago passed any "responsibility" for drug use onto society in general.
Need treatment? It is at everyone else's expense except the drug user. But often there isn't much treatment to be had because of this.
Cause an accident? The victim is the drug user. The person(s) they injured are compensated by their own insurance as well as state and federal funds. But there are limits, so the collateral damage is just a write-off.
Become a poor performer at your job? You get fired and fall on state and federal programs to keep you eating and in some kind of shelter. Not the best, and sometimes not much at all.
I do not see any "personal responsibility" here at all. I see a societal problem that keeps right on growing in cost to everyone except the drug user. The drug user has no role to play in this at all. Their life may be hell once the drugs take over, but often they are unaware of the hell their life is.
You can't pass drug use off as a individual decision when all of the consequences fall to society in general. Either we take care of these people or we don't. Either way, because they have little, if any, resources there isn't a thing they can be held responsible for.
You, the average/. reader already has a whitelist of sorts. At least informally. Do you install everything that is potientially executable on a computer? No? I'd say you are using a whitelist then.
OK, moving on to Grandma or Aunt Sally. How the heck are they supposed to tell the difference between an application written by Microsoft and one written by the Russian Mob(tm)? One is a instant messenger tool that communicates with the world, the other is an instant messenger tool that also steals passwords. Assuming equal external functionality, who is to say one is good and one is bad?
At the "user" level without a knowledgable administrator, something like this has to be done. It has nothing to do with security - because if you leave the security decisions to a user that doesn't know the difference, bad decisions will be made. And once you install a compromised application it is over - you have no security.
Sure, in a properly-sandboxed environment it might be possible to limit the damage from such an application. But, even on Linux there are applications that must be given authorization beyond that of an ordinary user. How would Aunt Sally figure out that this application asking for increased authorization should not get it? Who does she call to ask if this is a "good" application or a "bad" application?
The clear answer is that for the bulk of the personal computer user community there must be an administrator of last resort. And a whitelist of applications would certainly fulfill that requirement.
The only question is how many hoops does one have to jump through to get their application on the list?
For example DVD playing is NOT in a default Windows install
You must be thinking of the Euro-version of Windows without Windows Media Player. With Windows Media Player, Windows comes out of the box playing DVDs.
As far as I know, there is no Linux-based DVD player that can be distributed without violating either the DVD Forum's or Macrovision's rights. All it would take is someone getting enough revenue to apply for and receive a license from both of these entities. Today, nobody has stepped up to the plate for Linux.
It amazes me how much has been lost over the years towards the "consumerization" of computers.
Large mainframe systems have had data integrity problems solved for a long, long time. It is today unthinkable that any hardware issues or OS issues could corrupt data on IBM mainframe systems and operating systems.
Personal computers, on the other hand, have none of the protections that have been present since the 1970s on mainframes. Yes, corruption can occur anywhere in the path from the CPU to the physical disk itself or during a read operation. There is no checking, period. And not only are failures unlikely to be quickly detected but they cannot be diagnosed to isolate the problem. All you can do is try throwing parts at the problem, replacing functional units like the disk drive or controller. These days, there is no separate controller - its on the motherboard - so your "functional unit" can almost be considered to be the computer.
How often is data corrupted on a personal computer? It is clear it doesn't happen all that often, but in the last fourty years or so we have actually gone backwards in our ability to detect and diagnose such problems. Nearly all businesses today are using personal computers to at least display information if not actually maintain and process it. What assurance do you have that corruption is not taking place? None, really.
A lot of businesses have few, if any, checks that would point out problems that could cost thousands of dollars because of a changed digit. In the right place, such changes could lead to penalties, interest and possible loss of a key customer.
Why have we gone backwards in this area when compared to a mainframe system of fourty years ago? Certainly software has gotten more complex but basic issues of data integrity have fallen by the wayside. Much of this was done in hardware previously. It could be done cheaply in firmware and software today with minimal cost and minimal overhead. But it is not done.
Most registrars will allow phony names to be used and they do not do any cross-checking. If I want to registe a domain to "Santa Claus" I can even though I used my credit card to do it.
Police? They pretty much say they have bigger problems or it isn't worth their time. In the US you need to get at least $25,000 worth of damages and then the FBI will look into it. Just to be on the safe side, you better have lost $100,000 to get any real attention.
Nobody cares and enforcement actions like this are less than a drop in the bucket. It is a free crime that zero enforcement ensures will continue every day. Just like panhandling. You can't stop it, so just learn to live with it.
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Unfortunately, no amount of secure programming will prevent the user from installing an application that purports to be the greatest thing they need and have to install it RIGHT NOW. Of course, they do it.
Whatever security exists, it is now gone. I assure you that no system can withstand a determined user. Linux with SELInux cannot help - the user will simply turn it off when instructed to do so. If software can be installed on the computer by an idiot, there is no security.
What would the possible marketing effects of having a public deal with Microsoft be for Novell? Would you not expect that they would exploit any such deal based on interoperability? Of course they are going to market it that way.
This is an obvious marketing approach that was visible with the first mention of a deal with Microsoft.
The elderly would suffer the most from a universal healthcare system in the US. Right now, most healthcare spending is in the last year or so of life. There is also a spike for newborns, mostly preemies and drug-addicted babies.
If we get universal healthcare in the US, we're going to have to have an age-based cutoff like other countries do. Sorry, no treatment if you are over 70 or something like that. I don't see the AARP and similar groups going for that and they are a pretty substantial voting block.
With the telco's goes the backbone that is the Internet today. Yes, there is a significant chance that people will use the infrastructure without paying telephone rates and this will absolutely doom the current infrastructure. Then the cable companies will be faced with a situation where there isn't anything to connect them to anyone else left.
Similarly, when the infrastructure gets turned off WiFi providers aren't going to be connected either.
Do you think the government is going to step in and take over ownership of the fiber backbones? I don't see that happening. Since there is almost no revenue in operating the fiber backbone infrastructure it is also unlikely someone will run in and pick up the infrastructure to rescue it - it is going to die. Maybe Google will have enough fiber they own to continue the Internet without anyone else. Maybe not.
VOIP certainly stands to kill off the revenue that is supporting the current infrastructure.
The problem isn't Verizon deciding to block "some" messages they do not like. The issue is that Verizon is blocking messages constantly. From advertisers that want to assail your cell phone with text messages. Sure, Verizon could allow it all with a minor change in policy. Then you would get text messages just like you get spam - 24x7 constant mortgage offers, pseudo-pharmacies and male enhancement products.
No, Verizon and all of the other carriers are doing a great job at blocking the sending of text messages. Just because you aren't hearing about all of the blocking they are doing doesn't mean they are not turning down people every day.
Today the carriers choose what outside text messages to allow into the system. If you want to set up a system to send text messages to lots and lots of people, you need to deal with the carrier and they will ask you what you are sending. And filter agreements based on this.
Failure to do this will clearly result in text messaging being used for advertising. Lots of advertising because it is both (a) cheap for people that sign up with the carrier and (b) a revenue source because they charge people to receive these messages.
If the carrier were to make it open for anyone to send bulk text messages to people they would have to allow text messages to be filtered. They do not today. You can turn off text messages altogether but you cannot discriminate between sources of them. Such discrimination would fly in the face of the agreements they have with bulk senders.
So you want openness? You want to remove the filtering that the carriers are doing today? I don't think so.
In Chicago they have gangs. Gangs that recruit from school yards. Gangs that have "community breakfasts" where they get people together to show what good things the gang is doing in the community. Activities sanctioned by the city in parallel with shakedowns, drug sales, street battles with automatic weapons, and other sorts of things you would expect.
The police know who is in the gang and who the leaders are. Arresting them is pointless because nobody is going to testify and sending a gang leader to jail means he no longer has to fear being shot by rivals - it does nothing to remove him from active control of the gang. Can't lock up the entire gang because that would be racist - we would be punishing black people because they are black. The "gang" part of it gets lost in translation somehow.
Chicago is a haven for gangs, gang violence and whatnot. There are some places where the gang is far more in control of the city than the police are. Putting a camera in these locations has been the current strategy because the police then do not have to have a manned presence there. Someone can sit and watch the camera rather than sitting in a patrol car in the area. They might be shot if they were caught loitering in gang territory.
Yes, there are other places in Chicago where the gangs do not rule. There are no cameras there. There are tourists, restaurants, movie theaters and so on and so forth.
Chicago is hardly unique in US cities. New York and LA also have the same issues. Chicago is just the first place where the police are often in active retreat from gang territory replacing manned presence with cameras. To watch as the neighborhood descends even further.
Nonsense. Do you understand what the output of such a generator would be?
I believe it is very high voltage with not-so-much current. Well over 100,000 volts.
The separation between the output terminals would be larger than the space occupied by the car.
OK, what if I'm wrong and it is lots and lots of current. At 1200MW the output current would require something that isn't going to fit in a car to connect to the output terminals.
Either way, it isn't fitting in the space of a car. Not even an Excursion.
This is the same thinking that says if you ignore a bully he will leave you alone. Wrong. He will escalate.
The problem with cyberbullying is that the victim doesn't have to respond in any way. Everyone else discovers the lies, half-truths and photos and comes to their own conclusions. Expect this to come up in 10 years or so when people start finding out they can't get a job because someone in 7th grade posted a (fake) picture of them having sex with a goat.
How many video's get uploaded to Google Video (or YouTube) every day? Well, there are a whole lot of people that are potentially uploading. Lots and lots. Let's put the number at 1,000 a day even though I think that is far, far too low.
Now we have a company that owns the copyright on a popular movie. They might be able to justify 4 people to look at video sharing sites for infringement so they can then request the hosting site to remove it. Let's assume there are no more than 10 such video sharing sites, each with an average of no more than 1,000 posters each day. I suspect these numbers are way, way too low but even so this means there are 10,000 new video uploads that must be reviewed each day, seven days a week, or you fall behind.
This is the situation that the DMCA has created. It was originally envisioned that there would be a small number of "web site maintainers" and there would be only a limited amount of new material. We now have user contribution web sites and the full force of the tsunami of such contributions. This wasn't what the originators of DMCA envisioned at all.
Face it, there is no way to keep up. The video sharing sites aren't going to police the content because it would make contributions more difficult. The copyright owners can't check everything every day without a lot more people being involved and getting paid for it. And nobody has any respect for copyright or copyright owners so it could never be a "community policing" effort. Almost everyone wants to see copyright infringment continue on and on, unabated.
User contributions which can be infringing encourage this sort of thing. There would not seem to be any solution to the problem other than just giving up. I fully expect to see people starting to get the message soon, and that will mean no more digitial distribution. If you don't have the DVD to rip, you can't redistribute it. If you have a movie that is a big hit why would you throw it all away by making a DVD so it can be pirated? The other alternative is just saying "bag it" and not bothering to make the movie in the first place because you know you aren't going to get a fraction of the revenue you would have pre-piracy days.
I also think you will start seeing wider commercial distribution of less professional movies. They are cheaper and could be put on TV for next to nothing. If you can't get 100 million dollars for a movie, maybe you will want to show one on late-night TV that only cost $5000 to make.
Today, it is possible to replace the operating system on any purchased computer. Computer manufacturers and small computer shops putting custom computers together can put any operating system on a computer they choose. Dell is shipping a very, very small number of Linux systems as proof of this.
Still it is difficult to find someone that did not purchase Windows with their computer or replaced it after they got it. Linux is free and has a consumer penetration of something like 0.001% so it cannot be about cost.
It is possible, although difficult, to get OS X working on a generic Intel box. Nobody is doing this on any significant scale.
Face it, if some goverrment decided to tell Microsoft and computer manufacturers how to run their business the result would not be much different. People would be running Windows. Why? Because there is significant benefits to having a common base of software and user experience. Neither are really possible with a mix of operating systems.
There are companies with mixed Macintosh and Windows systems, but not very many. And the interoperability between the two is pretty low - they like to keep the Macs in the graphic arts department and Windows everywhere else. The few that try to interoperate generally succeed only because their close interaction is limited. Yes, virtual PC software helps - which clearly makes this point. Mixing different systems interoperably is difficult and leads to the need to run the same software.
Windows has some problems, but most of these are caused by the user in ways that can be clearly understood. Fixing a lot of these problems is difficult because it would restrict how the computer could be used. A lot of these problems exist to a lesser extent on OS X because the system is considerably less flexible in how the user experience can be changed.
I don't see the point to a government mandate such as this. It wouldn't really change anything. Nor would it help anyone economically. It would not make Linux a consumer operating system.
Nice try. You are correct that distributing DC is inefficient but not for the reasons you mention.
DC is incredibily difficult to change voltages with compared to AC. Sure, there are DC-to-DC converters but if you look inside that black box you will discover it is transformed into AC and back into DC with pretty big losses. This isn't done unless there is some overwhelming reason to do it.
There is no difference in the wire between AC and DC, even over long distances. There are no additional losses with DC. Resistance is resistance and it is the same between DC and AC. With AC you also have impedence which isn't a factor with DC.
Because of impedence, over very long distances actually make AC less efficient in a transmission line. However, it was DC you couldn't use a transformer. So even though AC does incur some complications, DC is out of the question because (again) the inability to change the voltage.
Safety? DC was originally touted as being safer (by Edison) than AC as a criticism of Tesla. Edison was winning for a while but eventually lost out because Tesla was correct about distribution issues. I think at house current voltages a claim can be made either way and it is difficult to say which is safer. Both cause nasty effects on humans.
Superconducting distribution wouldn't change the situation between AC and DC either.
The reason we have AC today isn't losses or safety - it is transformers. Not the little ones in power cubes but the big ones out at the substation. The little ones might be replaced by switching power supplies, but the big ones aren't going anywhere.
The one smart move might be to change from 60Hz to 400Hz. It makes for smaller transformers, smaller capacitors (the other big thing at electric substations) and smaller filter capacitors in power supplies. Lots more efficient overall. Very hard to change the infrastructure that is built around 60hZ though.
This would seem to outlaw the collection of information in the course of purchasing products using credit cards.
I am going to have to review this to see if it is legally permissible to sell things to Canadian residents. I think it is entirely possible that all purchase records need to be purged to eliminate the data held to allow product updates and such.
Holding on to information to permit updates to products may be illegal under this law. This would make it impossible to add fixes to Microsoft products, or to process subscriptions for products like Norton Antivirus.
If people do not want information held by companies, absolutely their wishes should be respected. However, when such wishes are codified into laws companies should take the most draconian view possible of how these laws could be enforced. Under no circumstances should any requests "please keep my information" be granted. Any form of commerce that requires information should be kept should be blocked for countries with laws like this.
Certainly, any US company should not process credit card transactions from Canadian residents because this might allow sensative financial information to fall into the hands of other US companies, the US government or identity thieves exploiting the insecure nature of the US credit card processing companies.
For Canadians I would offer advice: cash only.
For all US businesses which deal with consumers in Canada it would seem impossible to now assure such consumers that their information cannot be disclosed through either security breaches and/or government action. Therefore, any information supplied to a US company violates the Canadian privacy laws. It would not surpise me that Canadians could be charged with violating this law if they supply anyone's information (including their own) to a US company.
Who tells the registry that the number has been disconnected? Unlike earlier centuries, there is no "the phone company". You get phone numbers from all sorts of people, some of which have little or nothing in the way of infrastructure.
The timeout method of recycling numbers is probably the only practical way to do it.
There is this little thing that some people like to refer to as "diversity". In some ways, it means catering to minorities and in others is means broader cultural vision.
Today, there is a cable/satellite channel dedicated to running old movies. How many people actually watch that enough to justify paying for such a channel? Damn few. How about a cable channel dedicated to television shows with Black actors? Today, there are more than one of these and considering both the number of people interested in such channels and their disposable income, it is doubtful that such channels would survive.
Sure, there would be plenty of people supporting the mainstream pablum that is on USA and FX. Movies with every questionable word silenced or redubbed. SciFi channel might survive, but it has a rather narrow appeal.
Unfortunately, the money required to operate an enterprise as a cable/satellite channel is pretty high. Today, if your offering gets picked up by cable systems you can operate and if not, every goes home to find something else to do. It isn't cheap to do this and it isn't going to be cheap in the future. This means that anything marginal or not clearly focused on the mainstream entertainment experience is going to go by the wayside.
I would miss the SciFi channel. I would miss TVLand and AMC (old movies). But my purchasing these channels on an ala carte basis would not be anywhere near enough to keep them operating.
Ala Carte is a method by which the larger media organizations get to push their message at everyone even more consistently than they can today. Anyone without a dedicated majority of the viewers loses. This has already happened with radio - there are few formats today and they all have mass appeal. Anything for smaller audiences is gone. Ala Carte cable will have exactly the same effect.
So this is the real problem with poverty in the world? It is the collective debt that is owed to the masters by the peons that just keeps accumulating with each generation?
Wow, I guess if this is true then the world really does need to have these debt-hording masters taken down a peg or two. No wonder there was a minor dispute with the government of England that caused the colonies to break away. Sounds like it is about time for the rest of the world to follow suit if everyone is held up in ancestral debt. Probably the best thing we could do in Iraq would be to destroy the bank records to free these people from their debt.
Your description was a little vague... is everyone held to ancestral debt except the US? Wow. That would probably account for all sorts of things, like people dying to emigrate to the US, consistent poverty world-wide, and a general distrust of those not held in thrall to this ancestral debt.
Thanks for the useful information.
You go into the store, you are now a potential shoplifter. There is no (good) way to tell if the person leaving the store is in fact a shoplifter or not. The store has a choice - they can treat everyone as a potential shoplifter or not. That is pretty much the limit. Notice I'm not saying they can treat everyone as a shoplifter-in-fact, just a potential shoplifter.
You go to a donut shop and they are unlikely to check your bag on the way out. You go to a store where they sell tiny, valuable items and they are very, very likely to check your bag on the way out.
The other alternative is all merchandise is locked away and the store simply fetches stuff from the locked-away-room upon request. Some places operate this way today because of theft. Jewelry stores have a slightly different approach to the same problem, but it is all about small easily-stolen items of high value.
Face it, the US is a den of thieves. Shoplifting in many places runs to as high as 10% of the patrons. This means that there are so many actual shoplifters each day that they have to do something about the problem. If people didn't steal there would be a lot less security. Do you think the store likes spending money on cameras, theft deterrence systems, receipt checkers and the like? Do you think they are doing it just to hassle people?
I can't imagine Dell requiring open-source drivers. Even if to support their Linux offerings.
The problem isn't the lack of drivers, it is what the Chinese will do with an open-source driver. Hardware manufacturer spends lots of time (read: money) developing software-instead-of-hardware approach to make a given computer peripherial lower cost to the consumer. After all, software engineering is a non-reoccuring expense whereas if you put it in the hardware you get to just keep buying the chips. Today, they keep that software-instead-of-hardware a secret and get paid for their product.
You release the hardware specs (or better yet, a real working driver) and you now enable somebody to duplicate all that work in a couple of weeks just reusing (yes, stealing) the software. No R&D time. Much, much cheaper product.
So, are you going to buy the $100 item or the $50 one? Without some kind of protection against the open theft and import of cheap knock-offs manufacturing in the West is doomed. Today, there is no protection. Who do you think wrote the software in the $29 DVD player? You don't actually believe it was written in China, do you? How about that DVD writer that cost $49? Where did the firmware come from?
The problem is nobody really knows what is significant. So, they are scooping up whatever information they can find with the hope that someday there will be an important correlation.
Could this be used for other purposes? Probably not, because of the volume of the information and what it is going to take to really get down and start mining it.
The biggest single problem in the US today is there are indeed terrorists and we have had some incidents blocked. But almost no information about what has been blocked has leaked out. So everyone thinks it is all nonsense. As some people have mentioned, it would be the best thing all around if 3 or 4 indicidents were not blocked and successfully killed hundreds of people. Better yet, if a bunch of foreign nationals got blown up at the same time. Perhaps people would realize there is a problem and we're not anywhere near as isolated as we were in 1850.
So when would all this collected information be of value? After something big happens. What if it doesn't? What if everything is successfully (and secretly) blocked in the planning stages as it has been so far? Any program like this would be considered foolish and pointless, and invasion of everyone's privacy for no gain whatsoever.
But let one incident happen and the newsmedia will be all over the government for "not doing something." Today the criticism is for doing seemingly pointless things when still nobody can figure out what would be (a) acceptable and (b) useful. Would El Al style interrogations before boarding a plane produce useful results? Probably not - we're not looking for hijackers now. What we are certainly going to see is some kind of different attack vector. What would be useful to know about the (dead) perpetrators of that event? I don't think anybody knows.
The other approach that doesn't have much favor in the US government right now is to treat terrorism-related attacks like a tornado. It just happens and messes up a lot of stuff but there isn't anything that can be done about it. As far as I know, no government is taking that attitude - certainly not UK, Germany or Israel where attacks have ocurred. Would this work in the US? Sure - until the first attack. It is difficult to play the role of standing up and saying "it just happens" to a crying mother/father/brother/sister on TV. So incredibly difficult that no elected or unelected member of the government is ever going to do it.
The price of anything is determined by the lowest price that the item can be had for. What the Internet does is destroy most ability for price discrimination.
Where at one time you could dig through catalogs, classified ads and lots of other stuff trying to find a low price today it is much simpler. What the school book store does is have everything where you can put your hand on it vs. placing and order and getting it later. Many net-savvy people are deciding that the immediacy of having an item isn't as important as the price. This is facilitated by price search tools and pricing consolidation tools.
You also have criminal enterprises able to sell stuff at a fraction of the manufacturer's price. This is uncommon for textbooks but getting more and more common with other stuff. Today, anything of high value and low volume can be found on the Internet from black and gray market dealers, usually at less than 50% of the manufacturer's list price. Why not if you can steal it and resell it without much chance of getting caught? You can worry about the ethics of it after the first few million.
The problem is you are trading low price for locality and service. It also clearly pushes everything towards the Wal-Mart mentality of low, low prices at any cost. No "brick and mortar" store is going to be able to compete with near-slave-labor-wage warehouses and criminal enterprises. We are going to see the idea of the local store (of any type) go the way of the corner drug store.
The value of examining something before you buy will be lost in the mad rush for the lowest price.
Sorry, but we have long ago passed any "responsibility" for drug use onto society in general.
Need treatment? It is at everyone else's expense except the drug user. But often there isn't much treatment to be had because of this.
Cause an accident? The victim is the drug user. The person(s) they injured are compensated by their own insurance as well as state and federal funds. But there are limits, so the collateral damage is just a write-off.
Become a poor performer at your job? You get fired and fall on state and federal programs to keep you eating and in some kind of shelter. Not the best, and sometimes not much at all.
I do not see any "personal responsibility" here at all. I see a societal problem that keeps right on growing in cost to everyone except the drug user. The drug user has no role to play in this at all. Their life may be hell once the drugs take over, but often they are unaware of the hell their life is.
You can't pass drug use off as a individual decision when all of the consequences fall to society in general. Either we take care of these people or we don't. Either way, because they have little, if any, resources there isn't a thing they can be held responsible for.
You, the average /. reader already has a whitelist of sorts. At least informally. Do you install everything that is potientially executable on a computer? No? I'd say you are using a whitelist then.
OK, moving on to Grandma or Aunt Sally. How the heck are they supposed to tell the difference between an application written by Microsoft and one written by the Russian Mob(tm)? One is a instant messenger tool that communicates with the world, the other is an instant messenger tool that also steals passwords. Assuming equal external functionality, who is to say one is good and one is bad?
At the "user" level without a knowledgable administrator, something like this has to be done. It has nothing to do with security - because if you leave the security decisions to a user that doesn't know the difference, bad decisions will be made. And once you install a compromised application it is over - you have no security.
Sure, in a properly-sandboxed environment it might be possible to limit the damage from such an application. But, even on Linux there are applications that must be given authorization beyond that of an ordinary user. How would Aunt Sally figure out that this application asking for increased authorization should not get it? Who does she call to ask if this is a "good" application or a "bad" application?
The clear answer is that for the bulk of the personal computer user community there must be an administrator of last resort. And a whitelist of applications would certainly fulfill that requirement.
The only question is how many hoops does one have to jump through to get their application on the list?
You must be thinking of the Euro-version of Windows without Windows Media Player. With Windows Media Player, Windows comes out of the box playing DVDs.
As far as I know, there is no Linux-based DVD player that can be distributed without violating either the DVD Forum's or Macrovision's rights. All it would take is someone getting enough revenue to apply for and receive a license from both of these entities. Today, nobody has stepped up to the plate for Linux.
It amazes me how much has been lost over the years towards the "consumerization" of computers.
Large mainframe systems have had data integrity problems solved for a long, long time. It is today unthinkable that any hardware issues or OS issues could corrupt data on IBM mainframe systems and operating systems.
Personal computers, on the other hand, have none of the protections that have been present since the 1970s on mainframes. Yes, corruption can occur anywhere in the path from the CPU to the physical disk itself or during a read operation. There is no checking, period. And not only are failures unlikely to be quickly detected but they cannot be diagnosed to isolate the problem. All you can do is try throwing parts at the problem, replacing functional units like the disk drive or controller. These days, there is no separate controller - its on the motherboard - so your "functional unit" can almost be considered to be the computer.
How often is data corrupted on a personal computer? It is clear it doesn't happen all that often, but in the last fourty years or so we have actually gone backwards in our ability to detect and diagnose such problems. Nearly all businesses today are using personal computers to at least display information if not actually maintain and process it. What assurance do you have that corruption is not taking place? None, really.
A lot of businesses have few, if any, checks that would point out problems that could cost thousands of dollars because of a changed digit. In the right place, such changes could lead to penalties, interest and possible loss of a key customer.
Why have we gone backwards in this area when compared to a mainframe system of fourty years ago? Certainly software has gotten more complex but basic issues of data integrity have fallen by the wayside. Much of this was done in hardware previously. It could be done cheaply in firmware and software today with minimal cost and minimal overhead. But it is not done.
Most registrars will allow phony names to be used and they do not do any cross-checking. If I want to registe a domain to "Santa Claus" I can even though I used my credit card to do it.
Police? They pretty much say they have bigger problems or it isn't worth their time. In the US you need to get at least $25,000 worth of damages and then the FBI will look into it. Just to be on the safe side, you better have lost $100,000 to get any real attention.
Nobody cares and enforcement actions like this are less than a drop in the bucket. It is a free crime that zero enforcement ensures will continue every day. Just like panhandling. You can't stop it, so just learn to live with it.