This is nothing new. Keys are randomly generated. Testing strings for randomness is fairly easy, there are plenty of algorithms that can say "yes, this string has a random distribution of ASCII characters and fits the general profile of a 'key'". Perhaps I misunderstand the article, which is fairly lame, but it sounds like they have discovered a new way to recursively cat * | findrandom. That's nice. I suppose there is a problem with shared servers where lots of encryption keys are stored on the same server. They shouldn't be plaintext readable to everybody anyway. Bah. And you can cat/etc/passwd | dictionarycrack too. Design secure systems from the ground up. Don't whine about obvious vulnerabilities.
Disclaimer: I may be totally off base here as this article is mighty vague. I have the utmost respect for Adi Shamir, one of the brightest cryptographers out there.
What the fuck does this have to do with "those jews"? Why do some imbeciles on slashdot post something anti-semitic at every chance they get? Now, I have no idea whether Uri Geller is Jewish or not, but I don't see what fucking relevance it has. If you actually believe that somebody can bend spoons with their mind then you are an idiot, and you missed the whole point of modern "magicians"/illusionists as entertainers.
Your argument is somewhat flawed. With respect to SETI@Home, I can conceive of a number of ways in which to prevent spoofed alert messages and punish those who would abuse the system (alert messages are verified, and if the verification rejects the alert, the IP address is banned from the SETI@home server). If somebody really wants to attack and abuse a system such as SETI@home, they probably could anyway, as I'm sure the client-server interactions can be reverse engineered enough to hack it in some way. The system should really involve client accounts, and authentication and an abuse punishment protocol.
The point is that a robust protocol is always preferable to a security or integrity through obscurity system. As far as games go, there is a case to be made for some type of closed source verification module. That is most definitely *NOT* a case against Open Source in general, nor against Open Source in the corporate world. There is a lot of room for Open Source software in the corporate world. Game software companies are a small segment of the software world and have particular concerns and a particularly dynamic market sector. Most of us hope for more Open Source gaming software, but don't legitimately think all game software should be free (besides which, a large part of any game is story line, graphics, sound, etc. stuff that isn't even part of the core software).
I just have to take issue with part of Hemos' comment. Indeed, I do think there are sometimes abuses of the patent system. And I do also agree with other posters who have brought up the issue of fiduciary obligations of a company to its shareholders.
But what bothers me is that this does not make all software patents bad, nor even seemingly trivial software patents bad. If you use them to stifle competition, it is indeed bad. And I think that in this case Amazon is being somewhat out of line.
But I have myself applied for software patents that I thought were patently ridiculous (pardon the pun). Why? Because I could not shop my ideas, and demos around without it. In fact, I have had a supposedly reputable incubator firm try to steal a product and business plan from me. The only leverage I had was a couple of possibly unenforcible, or circumventable patents (not as ridiculous as one-click shopping.. that would be hard to do). Damn straight I waved those around as a deterrent to prevent these people from going ahead with what they said they'd do (pursuing my company without me). In a world without nondisclosure agreements, patents can sometimes be your only defense against other peoples' immoral actions.
I think some of us consider the Right to Fork as an important part of the GPL, and other licenses, such as the Artistic license.
The Right to Fork (RtF) is important because it ensures that in the event that the code maintainers go crazy, decide they refuse to incorporate features that many users want, etc. that otthers can take the codebase and fork it.
For example this happened with GNU Emacs, which forked into Xemacs over design and philosophy disputes.
The end result of forking is usually good, in the way in which the GPL allows it. Because all the resultant code must be open and Free, the incentive is to maintain compatibility so as to get people to actually use your forked code. And The GPL is Compatibility-Wise Viral (or some such buzzword enabled thing).
I guess my point is that forking isn't inherently bad, and the GPL doesn't intend to prevent it, just make sure it is done by a set of rules that encourage Freedom and compatibility.
Actually, they have a functioning 5 or 6 qubit prototype over at MIT, in Seth Lloyd's research group, I believe. But perhaps some unforeseen (maybe non-NMR based) appraoch to QC has been devleloped by the NSA. *shrug*
Perhaps. Or perhaps they have quantum computing developed to the point where they can utilize a massively nondeterministic attack on the RSA (key-exchange) portion of the SSL protocol, so the conventional encryption portion is no longer the issue. Of course, I think that would be a pretty far out, paranoid view to take, not saying I think that at all. Also mind that the NSA is not going to be brute forcing your keys (wasting their computing cycles) to recover your CC number. They are overwhelmed with data as it is, they are going to be trying to keep track of known or possible threats to national security, terrorists, etc.
Re:oral sex angers the christian god!
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Dumb Laws
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· Score: 1
Read about Onan. Tell me what that says, at least with regards to spilling your seed outside of the vagina. Seems pretty clear to me what it's saying. Not that I agree with it. Reminds me of the old Monty Python song, "Every Sperm is Sacred" or something.:) Seriously though, most of these acts aren't explicitly referred to (masturbation isn't what Onan does, he practices Coitus Interruptus, which I don't think is particularly immoral, but is definitely a Bad Idea). Maybe God was just letting us know that Onan was practicing a bad form of birth control? Come to think of it, if we take the Bible literally, it clearly says that Onan was condemned and punished by God for refusing to fsck his deceased brother's wife. That's pretty nasty, and nobody nowadays would buy into that. So why the hell do they selectively use the other shit from the story? Heh. Hypocritical literalists. Anyway, I say beat off to your heart's cotent, and never refuse a good BJ.
Say what you will about Bill Gates, he is obviously an objectively intelligent person (he may be a bad, selfish man, but that's another story). Scientology doesn't go after people like that. He doesn't *need* Scientology (he's already more powerful than they are), he already has his own religion (ever meet many Microsoft employees? You could swear they were brainwashed).
Sorry, seriously though, Scientology goes after mentally marginal famous people like actors and musicians. These are not bright codes or hardcore business people. They are mushy-minded folk with pretty faces and charisma. Smart people are too enamored of thinking for themselves to make good Scientologists. Additionally, most cutthroat business types have their shit together too much to buy into Scientology, brains or no. Thus, for both these reasons, we won't see Bill signing up any time soon.
Fine, your statement that Mills' Utilitarianism defines the morally right as the most good for the most people is essentially correct. However, there are a number of ways in which he excepts from the strict Utilitarianism that Bentham espoused a few decades earlier. An example that Mills gives is the issue of lying. A strict interpretation of Utilitarianism would dictate that it is okay to lie if the consequences of lying are better (in the Utilitarian sense) than the consequences of truthfulness. However Mill makes an argument about the fact that the character of a society in which people may be untruthful is bad in itself, in that it will be more harmful in the long term to many people, in ways that are not immediately obvious or immediate consequences of the individual lie.
I could go on, but see if you can figure out for yourself how the argument follows in this case.
Note that I did not just say Utilitarianism, the philosophy, in my original post, nor did I mean that. I meant the text of the essary "Utilitarianism" written by JS Mill. Mill is most certainly not a strict Benthamian Utilitarian. That is why I say that you have not read the book, which you admit.
Everything is in the place in which you would expect it. You don?t have to search for it. If you really should have some troubles one time, then the electronical and intelligent assistant ?Mr.James? will help you.
I got a good laugh out of that paragraph. Mr. James will help you... hehe... Office paperclip meets Ask Jeeves and answers *your* vaporware questions. LOL.
Do not be an idiot. Read the rest of my post. Commenting on those two lines in isolation makes it clear that you didn't bother to read what I said above. If you are going to be a brainless antagonistic little fsck, do yourself a favor and don't post anonymously.
Your response is quite simply dumb. Please actually read what you are blabbering about next time, and don't post anonymously if you want me to bother making a real refutation of your points, or exmplaining things to your idjit mind.
Well I was basically arguing that it was "worse" not that I necessarily agreed that we should have the legislation. See my other post above. From a practical perspective I don't really think we should.
However, in reply to your argument, in an ideal judicial system and ideal world, we *would* punish crimes that harm the character of a small town's society to a greater extent. In practice, again I think this will usually come about due to judicial discretion.
Oh yeah, and you can leave a small town and go elsewhere. You can't stop being gay or straight or black or white.
Ah yes, missed one point I wanted to make. I also think that judicial sentencing discretion usually enables judges to punish destructive crimes such as this to a greater extent anyway.
Actually, I realize that my post wasn't quite complete. I should have expressed the fact that I generally don't support the actual *implementation* of such legislation, since I kind of doubt they will help at all in the way of deterrence, and I think it's probably nearly impossible most of the time to determine to determine what somebody's actual motivation behind committing a crime is (to that granularity of detail, at least). Yes, there are some egregious cases that would be caught under such legislation and punished additionally, but there are also probably a lot of crimes that could be largely mislabeled. So I partially agree with you on this one -- this sort of law's abuse potential in the system generally outweighs the positive benefits of discouraging a particularly heinous sort of crime (one that affect society in a particularly negative way).
I don't know if I agree with the intentions behind the legislation always being bad. I think the intentions are usually good... to express in the body of law our strong disapproval for actions that are particularly harmful to society (i.e. crimes against society in addition to crimes against individuals).
Let it also be known that I am not exactly an Al Gore fan. I'm a Bradley supporter, and I think Bush would be my second choice.
By the way, you might want to read John Stuart Mills' Utilitarianism. He addresses acts that adversely affect the character of society in an interesting and thought provoking way.
I understand your complaint, but you don't quite get the idea behind hate crimes legislation. It's not to say that committing a crime against somebody who is a minority is worse. It's about motivation for the crime. If somebody robs your home and kills you, it's murder. Doesn't matter if you are gay, straight, white, black, whatever.
Violence of any sort is harmful to society. But when violence is committed against certain people, or they are targetted for crimes based solely or primarily on their race, sexual orientation or other depersonalized factor, the effect on society is greater. The *character* of society is harmed, as other people in that minority group end up living in fear of the same occurence.
I realize that we must all fear random, or personally directed violence or crime. But the sort of fear is different - we don't feel like we have to hide who we are, or what our lifestyle is to prevent violence or crime being directed at us.
I would argue it is in the interest of the law and the government to protect the character of society, i.e. prevent people from having to live in fear to the best of its ability. Hence, while it's clearly not worse for somebody to kill a gay or black person, if somebody kills somebody or attacks them for these reasons, they are contributing to a character of terror in our society, which is more harmful than the limited scope of the violent act itself.
This is good news. No, strike that, this is awesome news. Not only does GPG have financial backing to pursue their excellent project, they have a vote of confidence and support from a government grant/donation. I'd be curious to see exactly what government agency or arm is giving this money to the GPG project.
I think the best part is that this confirms my faith that there are governments in this world committed to privacy and protecting their citizen's rights. I would never have expected to say that this is coming from the German government of all places (history aside and all, the modern German government seems to often have it's hands full controlling it's Neo-Nazi and extremist group problem, and thus would be unlikely to be an ardent proponent or supporter of encryption software projects). Maybe somebody who is German and can read the article and explain a bit more will enlighten me and the rest of us/. readers.
And it is still either a) protected speech under the First Amendment or b) if it crosses a certain line, it is libelous or slanderous, just as it would be if that person wrote it in a book or wrote it in an article or posted it on bulletins all over town. There is nothing special about the USENET forum. If somebody did these other things, they open themselves to a lawsuit. Fine, it's no different. However, it *IS* patently different from private harrassment, such as threatening phone calls, letters or emails, all of which are private, directed communications, notably different than a publicly posted message. My point is that it's wrong to accord special status to the USENET forum. Period.
I am not going to repeat the links to better sets of benchmark tests others have posted here. Okay, fine, look at these here. It becomes fairly apparent that there are two possible problems here. One is the RAID card used on the Dell system tested may not be the best supported under Linux, as of kernel version 2.2.6. But let's put that possibility aside.
There is definitely a problem with the 4 ethernet card configuration that the Mindcraft folk use. I personally have never used more than 2 ethernet cards on a Linux box, and that caused some problems for me at first. I can certainly imagine that 4 fast ethernet cards could make a 2.2.6 kernel sh*t a brick, which seems to be the case here. Especially see some of the absurd initial Mindcraft tests where performance falls almost to zero at one point. The link I posted above mentions the fact that the kernel starts spending all of its time in interrupt processing with high load on multiple ethernet cards.
Okay, so what do we gain from this survey? Simple, don't use a 4 ethernet card configuration on a Linux box. Period. Or do it with caution, use a 2.3.x series kernel. Stick with single 100bt configurations for 2.2.x kernels, DON'T use pre-2.2.7 kernels (TCP bug, serious performance problems may result, ahem). If you need more bandwidth than 100bt, go with gigabit ethernet, or don't use Linux (I'd be using Solaris if I were dealing with a system with that kind of load).
Better yet. I'd save my company a lot of money, and improve performance by getting 3 or 4 single processor systems, or SMP systems with single 100bt cards. I mean, all we're really testing here is static HTML or file serving. For the price of one of these whopper Dell servers running NT, I could have a FAR more efficient better performing setup. Anyway, just making some obvious points that occurred to me as I was reading through the Mindcraft drivel. They may not be lying, but they're definitely still not being honest about WHY NT appears to outperform Linux.
I wasn't necessarily saying it's *better* (at least I didn't mean to). I was trying to get across the idea that there is a trade-off involved here. You can't have both (governments that act benevolently in foreign policy and decentralized authority). Choose your poison. Right now, it seems that most people think it's better to have many different world governments (and for *now* that's probably a better way, although it may not be at some point in the future). The trade off of not having a central controlling authority is that there is no way to control or regulate effectively how governments behave towards each other, i.e. foreign policy. You could argue that if we (the US) were "nice" it would set a good example, but there's always going to be some self-motivated group (this is a basic game theory problem, and that's what foreign policy wonks have based US foreign policy on for years).
Restraining people from getting near somebody when there is a risk of violence or other negative outcome is a perfectly reasonable course of judicial action. However, this is restraining somebody from participating in *public* discussion. There is no physical proximity or personal communication of any kind involved. I could understand a restraining order against personal email, as it is invasive and personally directed. But nobody forces people on either side of a flamewar to participate in a public discussion, or moreover to read certain posts in a USENET newsgroup. Don't like a poster? Ignore their posts. Filter them out. Easy to do. Too lazy to filter, fine. DON'T READ THEM.
Needless to say I think it is wrong for a restraining order to dictate that a person cannot post in a public forum. If they are issuing threats, issue a restraining order against the parties threatening each other through any medium. Period. The USENET is a public forum, and should not be regulated or treated in some "special" way. If something is illegal to say over USENET, it is illegal to say anywhere (and all the more stupid, since it *is* a public forum).
I sympathize with you, but the problem is that the people in charge see foreign policy and domestic policy as entirely separate issues. Foreign policy seems to inherently be pursued in a Machiavellian, self-benefitting, and crass manner. Why? Because there are no laws or governments (with enforcing power at least -- the UN is just way too weak) to keep governments from behaving as if they are in the wild state of nature. That's what is really needed to prevent the countries with the biggest guns and most money from swaggering around wielding their power (in a sometimes constructive and sometimes destructive manner).
Why don't we have such an international governing body? Because it seems also inherent in human nature that organization on such large scales can only come by force: people naturally prefer smaller geographical levels of organization. Cultural homogeneity enables larger governmental organizations. We may eventually see this. Honestly, it wouldn't be such a horrible thing. It would prevent countries with big money and big guns from wielding that power in an unregulated potentially unjust fashion
Note: I don't blame the big bad US alone for this as many international./ers and other netizens seem to. The US just has the most money and most guns right now and hence is in the situation to be criticized the most for this sort of behavior. Howeverthis has really been a constant through the years. Nothing new here. Only the players change over time.
Re:But they did not use any Genetic Methods!
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Focus Group Art
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Please read the article before posting your comments. They were not given a choice of crappy paintings as you seem to portray it. The paintings were CREATED by the artists on the basis of responses to survey questions. So the survey questions came before the paintings, not the other way around. Admittedly, the paintings may be crappy (i.e. they may have been done in a certain way as influenced by the artists own preferences for certain subject matter, to get their message and point across to the viewer of the whole collection). That I think partially explains your perception here.
For physics and other scientific documents, there's really no alternative to TeX for now. And for that matter, for that type of document, TeX is exactly what's called for. Symbol heavy, text light documents with lots of funky characters where exact layout matters, and presentation style is important, and maximum flexibility is required -- that's what TeX does well, and that's why we (physicists) use it. Obviously Postscript isn't a good format for document exchange since it's not exactly human-editable.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I may be totally off base here as this article is mighty vague. I have the utmost respect for Adi Shamir, one of the brightest cryptographers out there.
What the fuck does this have to do with "those jews"? Why do some imbeciles on slashdot post something anti-semitic at every chance they get? Now, I have no idea whether Uri Geller is Jewish or not, but I don't see what fucking relevance it has. If you actually believe that somebody can bend spoons with their mind then you are an idiot, and you missed the whole point of modern "magicians"/illusionists as entertainers.
The point is that a robust protocol is always preferable to a security or integrity through obscurity system. As far as games go, there is a case to be made for some type of closed source verification module. That is most definitely *NOT* a case against Open Source in general, nor against Open Source in the corporate world. There is a lot of room for Open Source software in the corporate world. Game software companies are a small segment of the software world and have particular concerns and a particularly dynamic market sector. Most of us hope for more Open Source gaming software, but don't legitimately think all game software should be free (besides which, a large part of any game is story line, graphics, sound, etc. stuff that isn't even part of the core software).
But what bothers me is that this does not make all software patents bad, nor even seemingly trivial software patents bad. If you use them to stifle competition, it is indeed bad. And I think that in this case Amazon is being somewhat out of line.
But I have myself applied for software patents that I thought were patently ridiculous (pardon the pun). Why? Because I could not shop my ideas, and demos around without it. In fact, I have had a supposedly reputable incubator firm try to steal a product and business plan from me. The only leverage I had was a couple of possibly unenforcible, or circumventable patents (not as ridiculous as one-click shopping.. that would be hard to do). Damn straight I waved those around as a deterrent to prevent these people from going ahead with what they said they'd do (pursuing my company without me). In a world without nondisclosure agreements, patents can sometimes be your only defense against other peoples' immoral actions.
The Right to Fork (RtF) is important because it ensures that in the event that the code maintainers go crazy, decide they refuse to incorporate features that many users want, etc. that otthers can take the codebase and fork it.
For example this happened with GNU Emacs, which forked into Xemacs over design and philosophy disputes.
The end result of forking is usually good, in the way in which the GPL allows it. Because all the resultant code must be open and Free, the incentive is to maintain compatibility so as to get people to actually use your forked code. And The GPL is Compatibility-Wise Viral (or some such buzzword enabled thing).
I guess my point is that forking isn't inherently bad, and the GPL doesn't intend to prevent it, just make sure it is done by a set of rules that encourage Freedom and compatibility.
Actually, they have a functioning 5 or 6 qubit prototype over at MIT, in Seth Lloyd's research group, I believe. But perhaps some unforeseen (maybe non-NMR based) appraoch to QC has been devleloped by the NSA. *shrug*
Perhaps. Or perhaps they have quantum computing developed to the point where they can utilize a massively nondeterministic attack on the RSA (key-exchange) portion of the SSL protocol, so the conventional encryption portion is no longer the issue. Of course, I think that would be a pretty far out, paranoid view to take, not saying I think that at all. Also mind that the NSA is not going to be brute forcing your keys (wasting their computing cycles) to recover your CC number. They are overwhelmed with data as it is, they are going to be trying to keep track of known or possible threats to national security, terrorists, etc.
Read about Onan. Tell me what that says, at least with regards to spilling your seed outside of the vagina. Seems pretty clear to me what it's saying. Not that I agree with it. Reminds me of the old Monty Python song, "Every Sperm is Sacred" or something. :) Seriously though, most of these acts aren't explicitly referred to (masturbation isn't what Onan does, he practices Coitus Interruptus, which I don't think is particularly immoral, but is definitely a Bad Idea). Maybe God was just letting us know that Onan was practicing a bad form of birth control? Come to think of it, if we take the Bible literally, it clearly says that Onan was condemned and punished by God for refusing to fsck his deceased brother's wife. That's pretty nasty, and nobody nowadays would buy into that. So why the hell do they selectively use the other shit from the story? Heh. Hypocritical literalists. Anyway, I say beat off to your heart's cotent, and never refuse a good BJ.
Sorry, seriously though, Scientology goes after mentally marginal famous people like actors and musicians. These are not bright codes or hardcore business people. They are mushy-minded folk with pretty faces and charisma. Smart people are too enamored of thinking for themselves to make good Scientologists. Additionally, most cutthroat business types have their shit together too much to buy into Scientology, brains or no. Thus, for both these reasons, we won't see Bill signing up any time soon.
I could go on, but see if you can figure out for yourself how the argument follows in this case.
Note that I did not just say Utilitarianism, the philosophy, in my original post, nor did I mean that. I meant the text of the essary "Utilitarianism" written by JS Mill. Mill is most certainly not a strict Benthamian Utilitarian. That is why I say that you have not read the book, which you admit.
Do that first. Then you may reply.
I got a good laugh out of that paragraph. Mr. James will help you... hehe... Office paperclip meets Ask Jeeves and answers *your* vaporware questions. LOL.
Do not be an idiot. Read the rest of my post. Commenting on those two lines in isolation makes it clear that you didn't bother to read what I said above. If you are going to be a brainless antagonistic little fsck, do yourself a favor and don't post anonymously.
Your response is quite simply dumb. Please actually read what you are blabbering about next time, and don't post anonymously if you want me to bother making a real refutation of your points, or exmplaining things to your idjit mind.
However, in reply to your argument, in an ideal judicial system and ideal world, we *would* punish crimes that harm the character of a small town's society to a greater extent. In practice, again I think this will usually come about due to judicial discretion.
Oh yeah, and you can leave a small town and go elsewhere. You can't stop being gay or straight or black or white.
Ah yes, missed one point I wanted to make. I also think that judicial sentencing discretion usually enables judges to punish destructive crimes such as this to a greater extent anyway.
I don't know if I agree with the intentions behind the legislation always being bad. I think the intentions are usually good ... to express in the body of law our strong disapproval for actions that are particularly harmful to society (i.e. crimes against society in addition to crimes against individuals).
Let it also be known that I am not exactly an Al Gore fan. I'm a Bradley supporter, and I think Bush would be my second choice.
By the way, you might want to read John Stuart Mills' Utilitarianism. He addresses acts that adversely affect the character of society in an interesting and thought provoking way.
Violence of any sort is harmful to society. But when violence is committed against certain people, or they are targetted for crimes based solely or primarily on their race, sexual orientation or other depersonalized factor, the effect on society is greater. The *character* of society is harmed, as other people in that minority group end up living in fear of the same occurence.
I realize that we must all fear random, or personally directed violence or crime. But the sort of fear is different - we don't feel like we have to hide who we are, or what our lifestyle is to prevent violence or crime being directed at us.
I would argue it is in the interest of the law and the government to protect the character of society, i.e. prevent people from having to live in fear to the best of its ability. Hence, while it's clearly not worse for somebody to kill a gay or black person, if somebody kills somebody or attacks them for these reasons, they are contributing to a character of terror in our society, which is more harmful than the limited scope of the violent act itself.
QED.
I think the best part is that this confirms my faith that there are governments in this world committed to privacy and protecting their citizen's rights. I would never have expected to say that this is coming from the German government of all places (history aside and all, the modern German government seems to often have it's hands full controlling it's Neo-Nazi and extremist group problem, and thus would be unlikely to be an ardent proponent or supporter of encryption software projects). Maybe somebody who is German and can read the article and explain a bit more will enlighten me and the rest of us /. readers.
And it is still either a) protected speech under the First Amendment or b) if it crosses a certain line, it is libelous or slanderous, just as it would be if that person wrote it in a book or wrote it in an article or posted it on bulletins all over town. There is nothing special about the USENET forum. If somebody did these other things, they open themselves to a lawsuit. Fine, it's no different. However, it *IS* patently different from private harrassment, such as threatening phone calls, letters or emails, all of which are private, directed communications, notably different than a publicly posted message. My point is that it's wrong to accord special status to the USENET forum. Period.
There is definitely a problem with the 4 ethernet card configuration that the Mindcraft folk use. I personally have never used more than 2 ethernet cards on a Linux box, and that caused some problems for me at first. I can certainly imagine that 4 fast ethernet cards could make a 2.2.6 kernel sh*t a brick, which seems to be the case here. Especially see some of the absurd initial Mindcraft tests where performance falls almost to zero at one point. The link I posted above mentions the fact that the kernel starts spending all of its time in interrupt processing with high load on multiple ethernet cards.
Okay, so what do we gain from this survey? Simple, don't use a 4 ethernet card configuration on a Linux box. Period. Or do it with caution, use a 2.3.x series kernel. Stick with single 100bt configurations for 2.2.x kernels, DON'T use pre-2.2.7 kernels (TCP bug, serious performance problems may result, ahem). If you need more bandwidth than 100bt, go with gigabit ethernet, or don't use Linux (I'd be using Solaris if I were dealing with a system with that kind of load).
Better yet. I'd save my company a lot of money, and improve performance by getting 3 or 4 single processor systems, or SMP systems with single 100bt cards. I mean, all we're really testing here is static HTML or file serving. For the price of one of these whopper Dell servers running NT, I could have a FAR more efficient better performing setup. Anyway, just making some obvious points that occurred to me as I was reading through the Mindcraft drivel. They may not be lying, but they're definitely still not being honest about WHY NT appears to outperform Linux.
I wasn't necessarily saying it's *better* (at least I didn't mean to). I was trying to get across the idea that there is a trade-off involved here. You can't have both (governments that act benevolently in foreign policy and decentralized authority). Choose your poison. Right now, it seems that most people think it's better to have many different world governments (and for *now* that's probably a better way, although it may not be at some point in the future). The trade off of not having a central controlling authority is that there is no way to control or regulate effectively how governments behave towards each other, i.e. foreign policy. You could argue that if we (the US) were "nice" it would set a good example, but there's always going to be some self-motivated group (this is a basic game theory problem, and that's what foreign policy wonks have based US foreign policy on for years).
Needless to say I think it is wrong for a restraining order to dictate that a person cannot post in a public forum. If they are issuing threats, issue a restraining order against the parties threatening each other through any medium. Period. The USENET is a public forum, and should not be regulated or treated in some "special" way. If something is illegal to say over USENET, it is illegal to say anywhere (and all the more stupid, since it *is* a public forum).
Why don't we have such an international governing body? Because it seems also inherent in human nature that organization on such large scales can only come by force: people naturally prefer smaller geographical levels of organization. Cultural homogeneity enables larger governmental organizations. We may eventually see this. Honestly, it wouldn't be such a horrible thing. It would prevent countries with big money and big guns from wielding that power in an unregulated potentially unjust fashion
Note: I don't blame the big bad US alone for this as many international ./ers and other netizens seem to. The US just has the most money and most guns right now and hence is in the situation to be criticized the most for this sort of behavior. Howeverthis has really been a constant through the years. Nothing new here. Only the players change over time.
Please read the article before posting your comments. They were not given a choice of crappy paintings as you seem to portray it. The paintings were CREATED by the artists on the basis of responses to survey questions. So the survey questions came before the paintings, not the other way around. Admittedly, the paintings may be crappy (i.e. they may have been done in a certain way as influenced by the artists own preferences for certain subject matter, to get their message and point across to the viewer of the whole collection). That I think partially explains your perception here.
For physics and other scientific documents, there's really no alternative to TeX for now. And for that matter, for that type of document, TeX is exactly what's called for. Symbol heavy, text light documents with lots of funky characters where exact layout matters, and presentation style is important, and maximum flexibility is required -- that's what TeX does well, and that's why we (physicists) use it. Obviously Postscript isn't a good format for document exchange since it's not exactly human-editable.