There is also the fact that American ballots have probably an order of magnitude more questions than American ballots and that there are probably more than two orders of magnitude more ballot types in an American election than in a Canadian election.
The Canadian system elects a very small number of people to public office directly, the American system elects a very large number of people to public office. Most American elections are full of various propositions, initiatives, etc which adds significantly to the cost of printing ballots. American elections tend to be very local in nature-- each ward needs a different ballot for low-level offices, sections for Congressional representatives need to be consistent over quite a few wards, other offices are contested at a city, county, state, and national level. Throw in elections for things in a sewer district, for a school district, etc and American ballots are a mess.
There are certain sites that exist solely so that people of a particular political bent can discuss issues with other like-minded people. Reason and CommonDreams, for example, exist to highlight issues and arguments important to libertarians and liberals respectively. Forcing either to carry rebuttals from every group that feels put upon by their articles and/or editorials would be an onerous burden if for no other reason than their sites could be clogged with links to rebuttals, leaving little room for their own content.
Forcing a site to carry a rebuttal also infringes upon the right of free assosciation of the members of the site. If a bunch of conservatives want to get together to discuss tax policy, they have every right to do so free from interference of liberals. If a bunch of environmentalists want to get together to plot strategy for going after power company pollution, they ought to be able to do so without providing a forum for power companies to argue the issue.
Imagine what would have happened had this sort of requirement been in effect for Martin Luther King's march on Washington. Would you want Governor Wallace, Senator Thurmond, etc. to have been allowed to rebut the "I Have a Dream" speech?
Worldcom, though bankrupt, has assets now with value v0. Some of these assets are tangible, i.e. fiber cable, servers, etc, with value v_tan0. Some of these assets are intangible-- i.e. the top sales guys, with value v_intan0. By definition, Worldcom's current value is
v0 = v_tan0 + v_intan0
When Worldcom declares bankruptcy, the servers and whatnot stay with the company and can be sold off if the company is liquidated. Worldcom, however, doesn't want to be liquidated, which would throw away v_intan0. They believe that they can provide more money to their creditors by reorganizing, where they'll be able to use both tangible & intangible assets to generate money to pay off their debts.
Value of liquidated WorldCom = v_tan0 Value of reorganized WorldCom = v_tan0 + v_intan0
The problem comes in that the intangible assets aren't likely to stick around of their own volition. I'm sure Worldcom's top sales folks could get jobs with a much stabler company pretty quickly if they walked out. As the intangible assets depart, the value of Worldcom's intangible assets decreases by v_desertion. The company would then have a value v1 of
v1 = v_tan0 + (v_intan0 - v_desertion)
Thus, WorldCom asks to spend $25 to keep their intangible assets around. Basically, they're transferring $25 million of tangible assets to the intangible assets. The new value of the company, v2, assuming that the bonuses cause v_desertion to go to 0.
v2 = (v_tan0 - $25) + v_intan0
The judge has to compare v1 & v2 to see which leaves more value in the company for creditors. If v1 > v2, the bonuses are a bad idea. If v2 > v1, the bonuses, while decreasing the value of the company from its initial value, are good for the creditors.
From a physics standpoint, getting men and material to and from the Lagrangian points would be vastly cheaper than getting them to and from the moon. Until we could utilize the raw materials of the moon to produce things, it isn't going to be cost-effective to have a moon presence.
The difference between username & password
on
A Number For Everything
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The main problem with the social security numbers being used as identifiers is that far too many places treat it as both a username & a password. They assume, wrongly, that only you know your SSN, so they allow people to identify and authenticate themselves with a single number. If we moved to a system where everyone had a unique identifier that was public knowledge, companies would use it solely as an identifier, not as a means of authentication. That can only be a good thing.
While the case will probably turn on a technical distinction, it ought to turn on a much more philosophical one.
What is the primary difference between a search and a wiretap? Why do we more evidence before a judge can authorize a wiretap than before he/she can authorize a search?
1) A search is a one-time event, whereas a wiretap represents ongoing surveilence. As such, a search tends to capture a small amount of private, transitory data (i.e. conversations, web cache, etc) while a wiretap tends to capture and catalog a large amount of this sort of information. This is a much greater invasion of privacy.
2) A search captures narrowly tailored information, whereas a wiretap casts a very wide net. A search warrent that authorized the authorities to look for root kits on your machine ought not allow them to page through your Quicken data. (I realize that the standards for searching a hard drive haven't yet caught up to the standards that apply to the physical realm, but I'm making a philosophical argument.) A wiretap wouldn't permit that level of distinction.
3) A search does not require, or generally permit, surreptitious entry. Police officers come to your door, announce that they have a search warrent, and enter. When someone searches your home, they have to provide you with a receipt of the items taken. Everything is done very much out in the open. A wiretap, on the other hand, requires that the police don't alert anyone to their entry when they install the bug. The open nature of the search provides a suspect with context that may be useful should he have to exercise his Constitutional right to confront his accuser at trial. In addition, it provides a useful check on government power since it permits outsiders to analyze the pattern and practice of searches to determine whether there's an abuse of power. The FBI could get away with a lot of abuses by wiretapping civil rights organizers in the 60's than they could not have had they done repeated physical searches.
Using the "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck" rule, I would submit that the FBI make a wire tap in this case.
Re:As a humanitarian I'm outraged by the waste of
on
Home Improvement
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· Score: 1
Note that your cost figure is an order of magnitude too high. NASA's FY 2001 budget is on the order of 14.253 billion (see reference below). It's proposed FY 2002 budget is 14.511 billion. The latest census reports that there are roughly 281 million Americans. Doing the math, that averages out to $50 and change.
NASA Budget
ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/budget/2002/budget _s ummary.pdf
Census figures
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2000/cb0 0c n64.html
Unlike most people, apparently, I think this is a very useful development. Why?
1) It would be very useful for power companies, particularly in CA, to be able to power off A/C at will. Just like big companies get cheaper power rates when they agree to go off the grid for a few hours a year, individuals could opt for cheaper power in return for the A/C being shut off in a power emergency. Much better than rolling blackouts.
2) Those of us that don't keep a regular schedule can't necessarily program the thermostat to only turn on the A/C when we're on the way home. When I come home, I want the apartment at a nice temp, but I don't want the A/C going all day to maintain it. I'd like to be able to turn it off when I leave for work, then flip it on an hour before I get home so I can come home to a pleasant apartment.
Well, the Arianne 4 (maybe 5) was lost because of a programmer error. Periodically, spacecraft will have some sort of hiccup that involves software, though usually non-fatal.
More importantly, while it's possible to engineer software to much greater tolerance, it's simply not cost-effective to do so. The teams that code for the space shuttle, for example, write code that's about as bug free as mortal man can hope for. If you employed them to write your web browser, however, you'd have to get $100 from every web user for every new version just to break even. The time between sucessive browser generations would skyrocket-- we'd probably still be using Netscape 2. And forget about support for new features in a timely manner.
All in all, I'd much rather have a free browser today that does a pretty good job of rendering most any page and crashes periodically than a browser that never crashes but was stuck using 6-year-old technology.
Of course, I'd make the opposite trade off for the software that operates the jet I fly in!
Why is it that every series that depict medical staffs and/or lawyers can hire enough expert advisors to ensure that all the medical and legal terminology, procedures, etc. are factually accurate, but the same is rarely if ever done when science (computer or otherwise) is presented. Clearly, fictional lawyers face dire ethics problems much more frequently than do real lawyers and fictional doctors see more subdural hemotomas and operating room confrontations in a week than most real docs do in a lifetime, but the situations they encounter and solve are at least possible. If writers can generate interesting plots within the limits of existing medical and legal practice, surely they can operate within the confines of real science.
Yes, it does. Fundamentally, there is a difference between an organization that has a couple bits of data about me and an organization that has reams and reams of information about me-- the ability of the latter to extrapolate private information.
As an example, virtually everyone agrees that medical records should be private. Let's say that I go to my local pharmacy every month and spend $50 on some prescription drug. Given my HMO's publically available list of drug co-pays, you can determine a list of drugs I might be taking. Using information from the drug companies, you can determine a list of diseases I might have. Now, take a look at the articles I read on WebMD or one of the other health web sites. Correlate this with the probabilities with which these diseases occur among people of my age, race, gender, weight, locale, etc. Pretty soon, a lot of individually innocuous information will allow you to extrapolate private data, whether it's that I have AIDS, arthritis, or baldness. Do this for every member of my immediate family, and you can narrow the possibilities further.
In the past, we've been able to rely on the fact that the individual bits of data were spread among many organizations, each with their own proprietary format. The effort required in this regime to assemble the data above for any person was much higher than the expected reward. Today, more and more data is being consolidated under fewer and fewer roofs (i.e. DoubleClick). At the same time, technology is making it easier and easier to store and correlate this huge amount of data from various sources. Security through obscurity has begun to fail and people are recognizing that there isn't another line of defense.
While the above scenario may be unlikely, it's only for the reason that there's little use for the derived information today. The moment some organization (or individual) finds a way to profit from it, there's nothing to stop them from doing so.
The fact that it hasn't taken off yet should be telling. Ask the average American what shows he or she watches and they'll generally list 3 or 4. Does that same person watch only 3 or 4 hours of television a week?
Television is a very passive medium-- people generally are happy to watch whatever happens to be on at that moment. It's entertainment filler. If people had to plan out their future viewing, they'd never do it. One of the quickest ways to reduce the amount of TV you watch is to take the TV Guide and decide which shows you *want* to watch-- those 3 or 4 hours a week.
The only way to make this work is to make the boxes "smart", so that they observe what you generally watch and do the planning for you. Capitalism will, of course, take one look at this device and quickly figure out that the fine-grain consumer data it provides is worth a hunk of money. It can be used to decide which commercials to show you, what offers to mail you, etc. If you're using your cable company to access the Internet, so much the better to target you.
As you say, "capitalism will find a new way to make money through this". The question is what the trade-off for the consumer is.
While I'm sure there is some keyword searching being done, I'd be shocked if more thought didn't go into the system.
Surely there's some initial filtering done based on the identity of the sender and receiver-- messages sent between two people with FBI files probably get more scrutiny. Messages that cross national boundaries would also be more suspect, as would be messages the computer couldn't understand.
Assuming a reasonable set of criteria to prioritize messages, reasonable computing power could be brought to bare on "interesting" messages, easily defeating rot13. I'm sure they'd break 40-bit encryption regularly for really interesting messages. At this point, one could also do some interesting things analyzing the words used to try to identify coded messages. Someone from Montana who regularly describes building "watermelon" would likely raise some red flags here.
Of course, with 50 years to develop the system, it's surely smarter than anything we could envision in a few hours...
Most of the customers for high-availability clusters are corporations who use them in mission-critical systems. To them $1k/node is nothing.
As with all GPL'd software, you pay money for the intangibles-- tech support, documentation, and, in this case, value-added tools. When nodes running your stock market go down, you want to be able to pick up the phone 24x7 and get help real fast.
I believe that certified, licensed engineers have every right to get upset when programmers (like myself) try to stick "engineer" on their title. Much like the term "Dr.", "engineer" has a rather specific meaning and requires a good deal of time/money/effort/blood/sweat/tears to achieve. Whether or not we agree with the process they went through, we should respect the result.
In addition, the term "engineer" gives a weight to comments that programmers don't deserve. When a structural engineer gives an opinion (i.e. "That bridge design is adequate for xx cars over yy years"), I give that comment a great deal of weight because that engineer may be liable if he's wrong. When my doctor says a procedure is safe, I'm willing to trust his judgement because he legally has to stand behind that conclusion. No programmer can match that.
Personally, I don't think programmers should be licensed. Until we are, however, we should not call ourselves "engineers".
Why do I care what Debian or the others think?
on
APSL 1.1 Released
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· Score: 1
While it's certainly a Good Thing(TM) to think for oneself, it's important to remember that you are not an expert in all things.
The various leaders of whom you speak spend much more time contemplating licencing issues than most people do. They have access to various lawyers who are trained to see and understand all the implications of these sorts of licenses. I can read the text of the license and I can pass my own (positive) judgement on it, but passing final judgement before reading what these experts have to say is silly. Of course, you are free to disagree with some or all of them, but it seems awfully short-sighted not to listen to what they have to say.
First, I think people are confusing standard HTML with handicap-accessible HTML. One can certainly write standards-compliant HTML that links to a Real Audio file, but without a text translation, that file wouldn't be accessible to the deaf. By the same token, various proprietary HTML tags are quite understandable to the disabled.
Second, I'm concerned at whether the gov't will enforce wrong-headed design on the web. In the above example of a RA file with no textual companion, it would seem logical to me that the solution is to develope a speech-to-text browser plug-in, not to mandate that the site in question pre-translates the audio. I'd much rather see the gov't make grants to the innovative companies that develop software to translate existing pages into handicap-friendly pages than to go down this path. Plus, translation software makes *everything* accessible, not just those companies that deal with the gov't.
I'd bet that you could do a lot to solve the problem by rercuiting knowledgable users to secure systems. Go around to each dorm, frat house, department and ask for volunteers (or pay a nominal wage) to "assist" users in setting up their boxes. Whenever someone needs an IP address, new ethernet cable, or some other routine service, these "assistants" would be sent in to deliver the goods. While they're there, they'd offer to do a security audit of the computer. Nearly every newbie admin I've met would be more than happy to agree and to allow the assistant to turn off and/or update services. It doesn't guarantee that all the boxes will be secure, but ensures they start off secure and they get a few security audits over the years.
I think most people will agree that a company which invests resources to create a product (software, genetic, etc.) have the right to be the primary benificiary of that work. Patent and copyright law exists to guarantee this. It seems to me, though, that a third component-- trade secrets-- is often left off the list, despite the fact that it seems to be the logical way to handle these sorts of things.
Companies like Monsanto, Fraunhofer (MP3), etc. should not be allowed to patent those ideas and inventions which are logically viewed as trade secrets. Creating a new strain of corn, for example, doesn't involve the creation of a new gene or genes, nor does it involve any great discovery in the process of inserting genes from one organism into another. Rather, it involves the novel combination of known substances via known processes into a novel and useful product.
Think about Coke for a moment. Water, High fructose corn syrup, caffeine, etc. are all known substances anyone can obtain. Everyone whose taken high school chemistry knows how to combine these elements into a solution. Because no one knows exactly what proportion to combine these ingredients in, nor exactly how to mix them, however, no one can exactly duplicate Coke. Many try to create a similair product, and many make a healthy profit in doing so, but no one is "stealing" from Coke. It's the difference between Coke patenting "the production of any cola-flavored beverage" and them bottling their secret recipie for soda.
Monsanto et all can certainly operate under the same system. Monsanto can sell "SUPERCorn" and advertise its many benfits-- higher yield, shorter growing season, resists insects, etc. while retaining the precise method for producing such a beast as a trade secret. If Upstart Labs can use the idea "a crop that resists insects" to design their own "Upstart-Corn" strain to compete with Monsanto or make an "Upstart-Pine" strain that resists termites. Monsanto gains the primary benefit from their work, others are free to innovate, to compete or to carve out their own niche, and the world in general benefits.
Fraunhofer can deem the exact method by which they compress sound a trade secret and sell their work. If it's truely innovative, they'll have the benefit not only of a head start until someone can implement a competitor as well as a quality lead. You or I could use their idea to build our own GPL'd compression system, the phone company could reduce the data required to hold a telephone conversation, and some entrepenuer in 5 years could use it to build a new multi-million dollar corporation. The innovator gets the primary benefit, but others are free to innovate if they cannot.
Slashdot Mirror
There is also the fact that American ballots have probably an order of magnitude more questions than American ballots and that there are probably more than two orders of magnitude more ballot types in an American election than in a Canadian election.
The Canadian system elects a very small number of people to public office directly, the American system elects a very large number of people to public office. Most American elections are full of various propositions, initiatives, etc which adds significantly to the cost of printing ballots. American elections tend to be very local in nature-- each ward needs a different ballot for low-level offices, sections for Congressional representatives need to be consistent over quite a few wards, other offices are contested at a city, county, state, and national level. Throw in elections for things in a sewer district, for a school district, etc and American ballots are a mess.
There are certain sites that exist solely so that people of a particular political bent can discuss issues with other like-minded people. Reason and CommonDreams, for example, exist to highlight issues and arguments important to libertarians and liberals respectively. Forcing either to carry rebuttals from every group that feels put upon by their articles and/or editorials would be an onerous burden if for no other reason than their sites could be clogged with links to rebuttals, leaving little room for their own content.
Forcing a site to carry a rebuttal also infringes upon the right of free assosciation of the members of the site. If a bunch of conservatives want to get together to discuss tax policy, they have every right to do so free from interference of liberals. If a bunch of environmentalists want to get together to plot strategy for going after power company pollution, they ought to be able to do so without providing a forum for power companies to argue the issue.
Imagine what would have happened had this sort of requirement been in effect for Martin Luther King's march on Washington. Would you want Governor Wallace, Senator Thurmond, etc. to have been allowed to rebut the "I Have a Dream" speech?
I believe the logic goes more as follows--
Worldcom, though bankrupt, has assets now with value v0. Some of these assets are tangible, i.e. fiber cable, servers, etc, with value v_tan0. Some of these assets are intangible-- i.e. the top sales guys, with value v_intan0. By definition, Worldcom's current value is
v0 = v_tan0 + v_intan0
When Worldcom declares bankruptcy, the servers and whatnot stay with the company and can be sold off if the company is liquidated. Worldcom, however, doesn't want to be liquidated, which would throw away v_intan0. They believe that they can provide more money to their creditors by reorganizing, where they'll be able to use both tangible & intangible assets to generate money to pay off their debts.
Value of liquidated WorldCom = v_tan0
Value of reorganized WorldCom = v_tan0 + v_intan0
The problem comes in that the intangible assets aren't likely to stick around of their own volition. I'm sure Worldcom's top sales folks could get jobs with a much stabler company pretty quickly if they walked out. As the intangible assets depart, the value of Worldcom's intangible assets decreases by v_desertion. The company would then have a value v1 of
v1 = v_tan0 + (v_intan0 - v_desertion)
Thus, WorldCom asks to spend $25 to keep their intangible assets around. Basically, they're transferring $25 million of tangible assets to the intangible assets. The new value of the company, v2, assuming that the bonuses cause v_desertion to go to 0.
v2 = (v_tan0 - $25) + v_intan0
The judge has to compare v1 & v2 to see which leaves more value in the company for creditors. If v1 > v2, the bonuses are a bad idea. If v2 > v1, the bonuses, while decreasing the value of the company from its initial value, are good for the creditors.
From a physics standpoint, getting men and material to and from the Lagrangian points would be vastly cheaper than getting them to and from the moon. Until we could utilize the raw materials of the moon to produce things, it isn't going to be cost-effective to have a moon presence.
The main problem with the social security numbers being used as identifiers is that far too many places treat it as both a username & a password. They assume, wrongly, that only you know your SSN, so they allow people to identify and authenticate themselves with a single number. If we moved to a system where everyone had a unique identifier that was public knowledge, companies would use it solely as an identifier, not as a means of authentication. That can only be a good thing.
While the case will probably turn on a technical distinction, it ought to turn on a much more philosophical one.
What is the primary difference between a search and a wiretap? Why do we more evidence before a judge can authorize a wiretap than before he/she can authorize a search?
1) A search is a one-time event, whereas a wiretap represents ongoing surveilence. As such, a search tends to capture a small amount of private, transitory data (i.e. conversations, web cache, etc) while a wiretap tends to capture and catalog a large amount of this sort of information. This is a much greater invasion of privacy.
2) A search captures narrowly tailored information, whereas a wiretap casts a very wide net. A search warrent that authorized the authorities to look for root kits on your machine ought not allow them to page through your Quicken data. (I realize that the standards for searching a hard drive haven't yet caught up to the standards that apply to the physical realm, but I'm making a philosophical argument.) A wiretap wouldn't permit that level of distinction.
3) A search does not require, or generally permit, surreptitious entry. Police officers come to your door, announce that they have a search warrent, and enter. When someone searches your home, they have to provide you with a receipt of the items taken. Everything is done very much out in the open. A wiretap, on the other hand, requires that the police don't alert anyone to their entry when they install the bug. The open nature of the search provides a suspect with context that may be useful should he have to exercise his Constitutional right to confront his accuser at trial. In addition, it provides a useful check on government power since it permits outsiders to analyze the pattern and practice of searches to determine whether there's an abuse of power. The FBI could get away with a lot of abuses by wiretapping civil rights organizers in the 60's than they could not have had they done repeated physical searches.
Using the "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck" rule, I would submit that the FBI make a wire tap in this case.
Note that your cost figure is an order of magnitude too high. NASA's FY 2001 budget is on the order of 14.253 billion (see reference below). It's proposed FY 2002 budget is 14.511 billion. The latest census reports that there are roughly 281 million Americans. Doing the math, that averages out to $50 and change.
t _s ummary.pdf
0 0c n64.html
NASA Budget
ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/budget/2002/budge
Census figures
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2000/cb
Unlike most people, apparently, I think this is a very useful development. Why?
1) It would be very useful for power companies, particularly in CA, to be able to power off A/C at will. Just like big companies get cheaper power rates when they agree to go off the grid for a few hours a year, individuals could opt for cheaper power in return for the A/C being shut off in a power emergency. Much better than rolling blackouts.
2) Those of us that don't keep a regular schedule can't necessarily program the thermostat to only turn on the A/C when we're on the way home. When I come home, I want the apartment at a nice temp, but I don't want the A/C going all day to maintain it. I'd like to be able to turn it off when I leave for work, then flip it on an hour before I get home so I can come home to a pleasant apartment.
Well, the Arianne 4 (maybe 5) was lost because of a programmer error. Periodically, spacecraft will have some sort of hiccup that involves software, though usually non-fatal.
More importantly, while it's possible to engineer software to much greater tolerance, it's simply not cost-effective to do so. The teams that code for the space shuttle, for example, write code that's about as bug free as mortal man can hope for. If you employed them to write your web browser, however, you'd have to get $100 from every web user for every new version just to break even. The time between sucessive browser generations would skyrocket-- we'd probably still be using Netscape 2. And forget about support for new features in a timely manner.
All in all, I'd much rather have a free browser today that does a pretty good job of rendering most any page and crashes periodically than a browser that never crashes but was stuck using 6-year-old technology.
Of course, I'd make the opposite trade off for the software that operates the jet I fly in!
Why is it that every series that depict medical staffs and/or lawyers can hire enough expert advisors to ensure that all the medical and legal terminology, procedures, etc. are factually accurate, but the same is rarely if ever done when science (computer or otherwise) is presented. Clearly, fictional lawyers face dire ethics problems much more frequently than do real lawyers and fictional doctors see more subdural hemotomas and operating room confrontations in a week than most real docs do in a lifetime, but the situations they encounter and solve are at least possible. If writers can generate interesting plots within the limits of existing medical and legal practice, surely they can operate within the confines of real science.
Yes, it does. Fundamentally, there is a difference between an organization that has a couple bits of data about me and an organization that has reams and reams of information about me-- the ability of the latter to extrapolate private information.
As an example, virtually everyone agrees that medical records should be private. Let's say that I go to my local pharmacy every month and spend $50 on some prescription drug. Given my HMO's publically available list of drug co-pays, you can determine a list of drugs I might be taking. Using information from the drug companies, you can determine a list of diseases I might have. Now, take a look at the articles I read on WebMD or one of the other health web sites. Correlate this with the probabilities with which these diseases occur among people of my age, race, gender, weight, locale, etc. Pretty soon, a lot of individually innocuous information will allow you to extrapolate private data, whether it's that I have AIDS, arthritis, or baldness. Do this for every member of my immediate family, and you can narrow the possibilities further.
In the past, we've been able to rely on the fact that the individual bits of data were spread among many organizations, each with their own proprietary format. The effort required in this regime to assemble the data above for any person was much higher than the expected reward. Today, more and more data is being consolidated under fewer and fewer roofs (i.e. DoubleClick). At the same time, technology is making it easier and easier to store and correlate this huge amount of data from various sources. Security through obscurity has begun to fail and people are recognizing that there isn't another line of defense.
While the above scenario may be unlikely, it's only for the reason that there's little use for the derived information today. The moment some organization (or individual) finds a way to profit from it, there's nothing to stop them from doing so.
The fact that it hasn't taken off yet should be telling. Ask the average American what shows he or she watches and they'll generally list 3 or 4. Does that same person watch only 3 or 4 hours of television a week?
Television is a very passive medium-- people generally are happy to watch whatever happens to be on at that moment. It's entertainment filler. If people had to plan out their future viewing, they'd never do it. One of the quickest ways to reduce the amount of TV you watch is to take the TV Guide and decide which shows you *want* to watch-- those 3 or 4 hours a week.
The only way to make this work is to make the boxes "smart", so that they observe what you generally watch and do the planning for you. Capitalism will, of course, take one look at this device and quickly figure out that the fine-grain consumer data it provides is worth a hunk of money. It can be used to decide which commercials to show you, what offers to mail you, etc. If you're using your cable company to access the Internet, so much the better to target you.
As you say, "capitalism will find a new way to make money through this". The question is what the trade-off for the consumer is.
>>>>
While I'm sure there is some keyword searching being done, I'd be shocked if more thought didn't go into the system.
Surely there's some initial filtering done based on the identity of the sender and receiver-- messages sent between two people with FBI files probably get more scrutiny. Messages that cross national boundaries would also be more suspect, as would be messages the computer couldn't understand.
Assuming a reasonable set of criteria to prioritize messages, reasonable computing power could be brought to bare on "interesting" messages, easily defeating rot13. I'm sure they'd break 40-bit encryption regularly for really interesting messages. At this point, one could also do some interesting things analyzing the words used to try to identify coded messages. Someone from Montana who regularly describes building "watermelon" would likely raise some red flags here.
Of course, with 50 years to develop the system, it's surely smarter than anything we could envision in a few hours...
Most of the customers for high-availability clusters are corporations who use them in mission-critical systems. To them $1k/node is nothing.
As with all GPL'd software, you pay money for the intangibles-- tech support, documentation, and, in this case, value-added tools. When nodes running your stock market go down, you want to be able to pick up the phone 24x7 and get help real fast.
Nearly as cool as the decision-- it contains Lisp code. That's got to be a first.
>>>>
I believe that certified, licensed engineers have every right to get upset when programmers (like myself) try to stick "engineer" on their title. Much like the term "Dr.", "engineer" has a rather specific meaning and requires a good deal of time/money/effort/blood/sweat/tears to achieve. Whether or not we agree with the process they went through, we should respect the result.
In addition, the term "engineer" gives a weight to comments that programmers don't deserve. When a structural engineer gives an opinion (i.e. "That bridge design is adequate for xx cars over yy years"), I give that comment a great deal of weight because that engineer may be liable if he's wrong. When my doctor says a procedure is safe, I'm willing to trust his judgement because he legally has to stand behind that conclusion. No programmer can match that.
Personally, I don't think programmers should be licensed. Until we are, however, we should not call ourselves "engineers".
While it's certainly a Good Thing(TM) to think for oneself, it's important to remember that you are not an expert in all things.
The various leaders of whom you speak spend much more time contemplating licencing issues than most people do. They have access to various lawyers who are trained to see and understand all the implications of these sorts of licenses. I can read the text of the license and I can pass my own (positive) judgement on it, but passing final judgement before reading what these experts have to say is silly. Of course, you are free to disagree with some or all of them, but it seems awfully short-sighted not to listen to what they have to say.
First, I think people are confusing standard HTML with handicap-accessible HTML. One can certainly write standards-compliant HTML that links to a Real Audio file, but without a text translation, that file wouldn't be accessible to the deaf. By the same token, various proprietary HTML tags are quite understandable to the disabled.
Second, I'm concerned at whether the gov't will enforce wrong-headed design on the web. In the above example of a RA file with no textual companion, it would seem logical to me that the solution is to develope a speech-to-text browser plug-in, not to mandate that the site in question pre-translates the audio. I'd much rather see the gov't make grants to the innovative companies that develop software to translate existing pages into handicap-friendly pages than to go down this path. Plus, translation software makes *everything* accessible, not just those companies that deal with the gov't.
I'd bet that you could do a lot to solve the problem by rercuiting knowledgable users to secure systems. Go around to each dorm, frat house, department and ask for volunteers (or pay a nominal wage) to "assist" users in setting up their boxes. Whenever someone needs an IP address, new ethernet cable, or some other routine service, these "assistants" would be sent in to deliver the goods. While they're there, they'd offer to do a security audit of the computer. Nearly every newbie admin I've met would be more than happy to agree and to allow the assistant to turn off and/or update services. It doesn't guarantee that all the boxes will be secure, but ensures they start off secure and they get a few security audits over the years.
I think most people will agree that a company which invests resources to create a product (software, genetic, etc.) have the right to be the primary benificiary of that work. Patent and copyright law exists to guarantee this. It seems to me, though, that a third component-- trade secrets-- is often left off the list, despite the fact that it seems to be the logical way to handle these sorts of things.
Companies like Monsanto, Fraunhofer (MP3), etc. should not be allowed to patent those ideas and inventions which are logically viewed as trade secrets. Creating a new strain of corn, for example, doesn't involve the creation of a new gene or genes, nor does it involve any great discovery in the process of inserting genes from one organism into another. Rather, it involves the novel combination of known substances via known processes into a novel and useful product.
Think about Coke for a moment. Water, High fructose corn syrup, caffeine, etc. are all known substances anyone can obtain. Everyone whose taken high school chemistry knows how to combine these elements into a solution. Because no one knows exactly what proportion to combine these ingredients in, nor exactly how to mix them, however, no one can exactly duplicate Coke. Many try to create a similair product, and many make a healthy profit in doing so, but no one is "stealing" from Coke. It's the difference between Coke patenting "the production of any cola-flavored beverage" and them bottling their secret recipie for soda.
Monsanto et all can certainly operate under the same system. Monsanto can sell "SUPERCorn" and advertise its many benfits-- higher yield, shorter growing season, resists insects, etc. while retaining the precise method for producing such a beast as a trade secret. If Upstart Labs can use the idea "a crop that resists insects" to design their own "Upstart-Corn" strain to compete with Monsanto or make an "Upstart-Pine" strain that resists termites. Monsanto gains the primary benefit from their work, others are free to innovate, to compete or to carve out their own niche, and the world in general benefits.
Fraunhofer can deem the exact method by which they compress sound a trade secret and sell their work. If it's truely innovative, they'll have the benefit not only of a head start until someone can implement a competitor as well as a quality lead. You or I could use their idea to build our own GPL'd compression system, the phone company could reduce the data required to hold a telephone conversation, and some entrepenuer in 5 years could use it to build a new multi-million dollar corporation. The innovator gets the primary benefit, but others are free to innovate if they cannot.