Nice to know I'm not alone. FWIW, I've suggested before that education be publicly financed, privately administered. That is, something like everyone ages 18-36 getting a monthly stipend and choosing how to spend it.
This isn't really a response to parent. I just saw a lot about federal spending in this thread, and as it happens, I was looking over the numbers for the FY 2007 actual budget the other day.
Following are the top 15 federal expenses which accounted for ~83% of the 2007 budget (all numbers are millions USD, my annotations in [braces]):
Old-age and survivors insurance (OASI)(off-budget) [Social Security]
483,896
Interest paid on Treasury debt securities (gross)
239,188
Operation and maintenance [Military]
215,728
Hospital insurance (HI)
200,327
Medicaid grants
190,624
Supplementary medical insurance (SMI) [Medicare]
177,595
Interest paid to trust funds [Interest on Treasury Securities]
177,265
Military personnel
126,374
Procurement [Military]
99,647
Disability insurance (DI)(off-budget) [Social Security]
97,552
Research, development, test and evaluation [Military]
73,060
Federal civilian employee retirement and disability
61,681
Medicare prescription drug (SMI)
49,105
Military retirement
43,510
Earned income tax credit (EITC)
38,274
If you want a better idea, see here (XLS).
Also, the top 34 expenses in that spreadsheet comprised 98.07% of that budget. From looking over all this I basically figured out that most of our top expenses come out of one of three categories:
Military
Social welfare of some kind
Paying interest on our national debt
Now I'm the kind of guy who just loves to rant about how much we waste on the drug war, miniluv, etc. But if you look at the numbers, you see that law enforcement, and even education and highways barely stacks up to these three categories.
If you want to know more about the national debt, first go to the oracle and learn about bills, bonds, and notes.
Then you can look here and here for more info on it.
The monopoly I'm talking about is the system where a telecom (for example) can run lines over a certain area, many of those lines crossing over/under private property, and yet not have to pay rent to those property owners.
You sound more knowledgeable than me about the history, so I won't argue with you there.
But realistically, if someone today gave ATT an ultimatum, saying that either they would be paid rent for the lines on their property, or else they would simply cut the lines, well it would be considered a criminal offense.
Why? Because they're acting against the public interest? Well sure, I agree. But doesn't that then imply public ownership over those lines? How can it be argued that these lines are the private property of the telcos? Because, if so, then what is their private property doing on all these other peoples' private property?
That's my point. I don't think things like telcos can come into being in the first place without the following conditions: 1) they get to run lines wherever the city/state lets them 2) they don't have to pay rent for right-of-way 3) they retain effective ownership and control of the lines
That's what I have a problem with, as it seems to me to just be a complete handout.
So my solution is to not grant those rights-of-way in the first place, and instead manage it like other government-run infrastructures. City-run water is an example of this. That doesn't make it a perfect system, but it does remove much of the profit motive and ultimately puts the infrastructure under control of the people, not of some executive board.
So I'm not talking so much about regulations, but more about privileges granted to these monopolies. Privileges that only a government can grant, and that government will not grant to us mere mortals.
Why is it that we task a company with producing information which may incriminate it? Isn't that sort of like asking a murder suspect to hold on to the weapon until his court date, just so the court can save money on evidence facilities?
If the court wants it, then it should be notarized and stored by the court, just like other contracts we expect the court to enforce (title deeds, etc).
If they are the private documents of a business (or of anyone), then how is it, owing to the 5th, that the court has any authority to demand production? Investigators most certainly have authority to tap, surveil, and record, given a warrant. But demanding you produce potentially incriminating evidence is another matter.
How is demanding document production a) constitutional, and b) anything other than a dumb idea?
I used to work at a law firm. I never would have, but I could have forged whatever I wanted, or omitted documents from production. Pay someone well enough and there are many people who will be more than happy to do that. So the only thing stopping it is needing a small enough group of people in the conspiracy that can be controlled. That sounds about as secure as 'security through obscurity'.
If courts want access to private communications on demand, then they need to pony up and use their own servers and bandwidth for it. Oh wait, that would be a gross invasion of privacy, wouldn't it? Exactly. Which is a pretty good sign that the policy is flawed.
I appreciate that you have good motives. I'll share a little secret at the end of this post, but first I want to tell you something.
I'm a desktop tech at a local 7th-8th grade school, full time. We are not urban, very much redneck town. You might wonder how there's enough to do here full time with just two grades here. But actually, I stay pretty busy at just the 7th-8th campus, fixing software problems, reimaging machines, and fixing wireless which is the bane of my existence, and occasional/. of course.
We have probably around 40 classrooms. Each has at least two machines in it, usually three or four, and each has it's own printer. Of these classrooms, 2 are big labs, meaning 25 comps / 4 printers each, and about 6 or 7 are medium labs, meaning 10-15 comps / 2-3 printers each. We also have 2 laptop carts that float around, one with 25 laptops, and one with 20.
Can I make a humble suggestion? Most schools in my area have entirely too many machines in them. Now I'm not saying yours is that way. But realistically a school maybe needs one full computer lab per grade. Anything more is excessive IMO.
Not ten minutes ago I was looking at a laptop. This was a classroom with five students in it, although they sometimes have 10-20 in there. They have 20 laptops for this one classroom (all needing wireless access, sweet idea!). I'm sitting there looking at it, and as I'm waiting for it to ping a server, I briefly look around and notice something strange around me. There are coloring pages of different pictures on the table I'm sitting at. No, not like a US map that the kids can color each state or whatever. All out coloring pages, like Garfield and stuff like that (the cat, not the President).
Anywho, after I'm sitting there a few minutes, this kid (remember, 7th or 8th grader) comes and starts walking around by me, and I'm looking at him peripherally wondering what the hell he's doing. He walks around to the other side of me, waits a few seconds, chooses the Garfield coloring page, and goes and sits back down. That's right, because the laptops were messed up, we're going to color now.
Now I should probably get the laptops fixed chop chop so they can get back to learning right? Wrong. Computers in public schools have become nothing but a cheap babysitter. I'm not saying that it's the fault of the technology, I know that the fault lies with administrators, teachers, parents, legislatures, and all of us really.
I guess what I'm saying is, don't fall into the trap of throwing technology at the problem. You sound like a good guy, so you should know that what these kids need most is a good teacher, pencils, notebook paper, and a chalkboard. It's good what you're trying to do, but you need to know that teacher quality has gone way down, and if you give them technology, they'll most likely use it to babysit the kids rather than trying to educate them. I just wanted to give you fair warning.
Now for the secret. If you want this district to have superfluous technology coming out the ass, here's what you do. Tell them to find someone who has experience writing grant proposals. Advertise the position, get someone good, and pay them well. All of a sudden, you will have technology grants from government and corporate programs amounting in the tens of thousands to the millions. So the grant writer's salary will more than pay for itself. Well, at least in dollar terms, not necessarily in educational terms. Don't know what state you're in. This is Texas, so YMMV.
Sorry if that's being a downer, I just didn't want you to get caught by surprise.
For instance, if a monopoly becomes abusive, it's not happening because they are unregulated and haven't been restrained from anti-competitive practices, [...]
You're missing something important. Why is our government granting monopolies to private businesses in the first place? It's unfortunate that a lot of people see what telcos, railcos, toll-road-cos, cablecos, etc are doing, and mistake it for a deficiency of the market. But it isn't a market, it never was in the first place. Because governmental bodies, whether, fed, state, or local, granted private businesses rights over the (private property of others | public property at large), whichever way you want to look at it.
I'll be the first to admit that most libertarians are blind to this. That doesn't mean that arguing the opposite of their position regarding markets has any validity at all. This has nothing to do with markets, because there is no market in this situations. There are only rent-seekers propped up by governments.
Just curious, but why do you say that about Russia? From everything I've seen, they have no intention of rolling over to Anglo-American dominated interests.
My understanding is that the Georgian stuff did away with a lot of potential for cooperation.
I'm not saying that a situation like trading allofmp3 for the WTO couldn't happen again, just that I don't see it as likely. You have something particular in mind?
South Africa's technology agency signed a three-year licensing agreement costing $800 per computer, says Daniel J. Mashao, the agency's chief technology officer. Namibia's government signed a three-year agreement for about $667 per computer, according to Gordon Elliott, head of administration for the Namibian prime minister's office. Those prices appear to be close to what Microsoft charges U.S. businesses.
Huh? $800 per seat? 800 what, USD? If those are client machines then that's insane. Even for Microsoft. I mean, the in-store windows pro for ~$200US gives you five licenses right? So I'd think, starting from $40US/license, then with an educational discount, then with a it's-frickin-Africa-and-we-have-to-pretend-to-have-a-heart-discount, it should be $10-20US max.
$800 license for Windows and Office? Are these server licenses maybe? Or is it a misprint and that's the price of an entire machine? I tried looking on Microsoft's licensing page, but their prices are obfuscated behind a 10-foot thick wall of PHB-speak. Ok, google produced this excel file that puts what is (I think) win pro at $311/4= $77.75US per seat. Can someone anointed with the licensing voodoo enlighten me please?
OT: the excel file linked from microsofts site is named: Copy%20of%20Price_List_Report.xls LOL
Yeah, and I think they started this recently, didn't they? I thought, screw it, I'll allow it for a while and give it a trial run.
Then, last night, I was trying to watch it and the video wouldn't start. Got down to where the only domain's scripts I had disabled was google-analytics.com. Maybe it was just a one time thing. But if I see the same behavior next time, well then, I guess no more DS or CR for me.
And then there's sites like YouTube which use flash to serve up videos. I mean, come on. Embedding a video file in a flash application makes about as much sense as embedding an image in flash. The right thing to do is to send the video over http, and let the browser decide what to do with it. Just like we do with.jpg,.pdf,.mp3, and everything else on the internet.
Then I'd think they'd be even more on the bad side the content lobby. There's gotta be just enough obfuscation in there that Average Joe doesn't want to screw with it.
This plan requires a laptop, flash drive, and some blank cds.
Have a laptop fully windows, nothing suspicious. Rip your movies to it like normal.
While on vacation, rip pictures to your laptop. Reboot into nix live on your flash drive. Tar all your pics, encrypt, and write a straight encrypted image to a cd. No fs on the cd. Then write "country mix" on it.
If anyone asks, it's a country mix you burned, but it must have gotten scratched or didn't burn right or something like that.
If you really wanted to go all out, you could even make it a real 9660 image. Just leave some space at the end, and tack on the encrypted tar.
Just wipe the pics from your laptop, and noone should be any the wiser. The downside is that you'll have to download some country/pop/some-sort-of-popular-bs for your mix.
* Peeking into your sexy neighbor's window while she's changing for a cheap thrill rather than going to a strip club. * Breaking into a house that's are nicer than your own and living there when the normal tenants are known to be away on vacation before cleaning up after yourself and leaving the house as you found it.
-------------------
visible.frylock Recording Industry Association of America 532 Lobbyist Way Suite #39BS Washington, DC 12666
Mr gnick:
We are intrigued by your ability to find privacy angles in seemingly unrelated phenomena. While traditionally we have made a focus of accusing private individuals of betraying society at large, this individual-on-individual view of the problem both interests and intrigues us.
We believe you could be a valuable addition to our team synergising our goals to become masters of not only social policy, but regulations of every action taken by any individual at any time. Please contact us. We would love to speak with you.
Sincerely, Masters of the human species (The pricks formerly known as the RIAA).
The problem of course is that the good guy is most likely going to be more than 50% financed by corporations rather than individuals.
Well, that is one part of the problem. Another huge problem IMO is that we don't have a house that's more proportional/based on consensus. 90% rule. 90% of the population is just dumb. What's more, this is distributed geographically evenly. (And for anyone who wants to chime in with a comment about the hippie blue states vs. the redneck red states, I'd like to remind you that blue states can be just as dogmatic.) Which means that in any house based on geography (use that word loosely *cough* districting *cough*) you're generally going to have to appeal to idiots.
One thing we need is a, say, 500 seat 3rd house. Nationwide vote. Approval voting or somesuch. 500 guys with the most votes get in. Then, to sweeten the deal, we could institute a 95% passing rule. If the bill doesn't have 95% affirmative votes, it dies the death it deserves. Actually, that'd be a good rule for the other 2 houses as well.
Then we could really vote for someone we want. Rather than some guy we just settle for because he happens to live (supposedly) nearby us. I understand the desire to have geographical based representation, and I'm not advocating removing that. But it isn't enough on its own.
This won't ever happen in our current system. But we need to start thinking about this stuff. Once our current system crashes, we're gonna have to replace it with something. And how did our current system start? By a lot of smart guys sitting around talking about their wishlists for government.
I've been thinking about how to reply to this. You're right of course. I guess the best answer I can come up with is that small differences (in IQ, for example) really don't seem to make much difference in the grand scheme. Japanese, for example, seem to be just as susceptible to human nature as anyone. IQ is not wisdom.
But these small things really weren't what I was trying to get at. In any event, the postulate of equality under the law trumps any differences, or at least it should.
The article also shows that among famous programmers, the ratio of males to females is much larger than among normal programmers.
Really? Seriously?
Is it still necessary to add the obligatory We Are Not Sexist bit to everything? In other news the ratio of males to females is higher among soldiers, firefighters, police officers, coal miners, and convicted felons.
Haven't we been over the sexist arguments to death by now? Is there ever going to come a time when we can talk about people without mentioning their gender, ethnicity, skin color, whatever? When we take it as a given that the median man/woman, black/white, Asian/Hispanic are equally as smart/dumb, and we don't have to hide behind PC language?
Maybe I just don't know enough, but why not get rid of numeric addresses altogether? I'm showing google as 64.233.187.99. Why should their web site be anything other than "google"? Why is it that "google" is 2nd class and 64.233.187.99 is 1st class?
How about:
Declare that all traffic going to 192.168.255.255 (or somesuch) really means "use IPv7", then encapsulate the "real" address underneath
Transistion period
Now, "google" is 1st class and legacy 64.233.187.99 is 2nd class
Drop 64.233.187.99 altogether
I fail to see why numeric addresses and ports are necessary. Why not "sourceforge:ftp"? Every domain could be 32 chars, 32 bits each, thus 1024 bits per address. Sure, it's slightly more overhead for processing, but speed gains can quickly overcome that, right? Didn't DJB have something to say about a problem with IPv6 not allowing much in the way of transition capability. If we just provide proper transition, would address space even be a problem today?
Disclaimer: I don't believe the official story, but I'm not a "truther"
You talk about the design of the buildings being such that the collapse in a predictable way.
I have a CS degree, and I'm in EE right now, although I haven't gotten into any specifically engineering classes (just math/physics, etc.).
To someone like me who is a relative layman, what would I need to study to get a better idea of this? One the things that always got me about the twin towers and especially 7 was the relative symmetry of their collapse. From my thinking, the only way this would be possible is for all or most of the structural columns to fail simultaneously. But apparently you're saying that's not true. Any links you can give me would be appreciated.
You're right for non-business or small-business laptop owners. But I'd think that for large companies whose laptops are lost, the CYA factor (we're cool legally) is much more valuable than the ~$1000 hardware cost.
Seems a little high. The pdf doesn't mention what was counted in "lost/stolen" laptops. Do they count every time someone couldn't find their baggage on the belt and reported it (and it just so happened they had a laptop)?
Only thing the pdf says about it is this:
Laptop loss frequencies were collected from a confidential field survey as either a direct weekly estimate or
as a range variable as reported by airport officials. Exact loss frequencies were typically not calculated or
available for review.
The article does say though that the study was sponsored by Dell supporting its ProSupport Mobility whatever. It claims that Ponemon conducted it independently.
Either way, encrypt your laptops, and try to setup RDC or somesuch, so you can prevent sensitive data from being cached. But encryption should stop casual thieves 99% of the time. I assume Dell's stuff they're selling is meant to wait until someone accesses the internet with a stolen laptop and try to track it that way. But shouldn't the top priority be to prevent data from being accessed in the first place?
What's more important? The data or the hardware cost?
I've been trying to understand this. Been reading the slides and some of the source, but I still don't get what he's referring to.
Correct me if I'm wrong. You're saying that the problem being treated is that, instead of locking an entire shared object, the atomic logic is pushed into the object itself so as to allow more granularity and thus less blocking? IOW, locking a specified portion of the structure rather than the entire structure?
Coming from someone who was playing with legos in the 80s, I couldn't agree more. I wish more people would understand, type checking isn't your enemy. It's your friend. Sure it can be overly aggressive and get in the way, but python, php, and perl go way too far in the other direction IMO.
Maybe this has gotten better since the time I was trying to get into Java (~3-4 years ago). But, for better or worse, first impressions are really important. And this kind of code is exactly what I think of when I think Java. I have some really bad memories related to Java (Swing, AWT, type conversion exceptions, Gui layouts (looking at you gridbox)). Some will leave and never come back. Some will try to come back and see if things have improved. Of those, some will return and some won't find anything to persuade them to change. Related to the topic at hand, the life cycle of a language and how it's managed can have a huge impact on the size, scope, and makeup of its userbase.
Oh, and I tried to blockquote that code here but the lameness filter stopped it;)
'If Hollywood could order intellectual property laws for Christmas what would they look like? This is pretty close.'
No, not really. I wouldn't think *AA cares about this too much. They're not dumb, they know this is horribly inefficient at actually catching infringement. No, Christmas for them is more pervasive DRM. Trusted Computing is more their brand of legislative heaven.
No, this sounds like fun more for law enforcement orgs than hollywood.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice to know I'm not alone. FWIW, I've suggested before that education be publicly financed, privately administered. That is, something like everyone ages 18-36 getting a monthly stipend and choosing how to spend it.
This isn't really a response to parent. I just saw a lot about federal spending in this thread, and as it happens, I was looking over the numbers for the FY 2007 actual budget the other day.
Following are the top 15 federal expenses which accounted for ~83% of the 2007 budget (all numbers are millions USD, my annotations in [braces]):
Old-age and survivors insurance (OASI)(off-budget) [Social Security] 483,896 Interest paid on Treasury debt securities (gross) 239,188 Operation and maintenance [Military] 215,728 Hospital insurance (HI) 200,327 Medicaid grants 190,624 Supplementary medical insurance (SMI) [Medicare] 177,595 Interest paid to trust funds [Interest on Treasury Securities] 177,265 Military personnel 126,374 Procurement [Military] 99,647 Disability insurance (DI)(off-budget) [Social Security] 97,552 Research, development, test and evaluation [Military] 73,060 Federal civilian employee retirement and disability 61,681 Medicare prescription drug (SMI) 49,105 Military retirement 43,510 Earned income tax credit (EITC) 38,274If you want a better idea, see here (XLS). Also, the top 34 expenses in that spreadsheet comprised 98.07% of that budget. From looking over all this I basically figured out that most of our top expenses come out of one of three categories:
Now I'm the kind of guy who just loves to rant about how much we waste on the drug war, miniluv, etc. But if you look at the numbers, you see that law enforcement, and even education and highways barely stacks up to these three categories.
If you want to know more about the national debt, first go to the oracle and learn about bills, bonds, and notes. Then you can look here and here for more info on it.
Oh, and /. needs <table>.
I'd like to clarify, but feel free to disagree.
The monopoly I'm talking about is the system where a telecom (for example) can run lines over a certain area, many of those lines crossing over/under private property, and yet not have to pay rent to those property owners.
You sound more knowledgeable than me about the history, so I won't argue with you there.
But realistically, if someone today gave ATT an ultimatum, saying that either they would be paid rent for the lines on their property, or else they would simply cut the lines, well it would be considered a criminal offense.
Why? Because they're acting against the public interest? Well sure, I agree. But doesn't that then imply public ownership over those lines? How can it be argued that these lines are the private property of the telcos? Because, if so, then what is their private property doing on all these other peoples' private property?
That's my point. I don't think things like telcos can come into being in the first place without the following conditions:
1) they get to run lines wherever the city/state lets them
2) they don't have to pay rent for right-of-way
3) they retain effective ownership and control of the lines
That's what I have a problem with, as it seems to me to just be a complete handout.
So my solution is to not grant those rights-of-way in the first place, and instead manage it like other government-run infrastructures. City-run water is an example of this. That doesn't make it a perfect system, but it does remove much of the profit motive and ultimately puts the infrastructure under control of the people, not of some executive board.
So I'm not talking so much about regulations, but more about privileges granted to these monopolies. Privileges that only a government can grant, and that government will not grant to us mere mortals.
They're pointless.
Why is it that we task a company with producing information which may incriminate it? Isn't that sort of like asking a murder suspect to hold on to the weapon until his court date, just so the court can save money on evidence facilities?
If the court wants it, then it should be notarized and stored by the court, just like other contracts we expect the court to enforce (title deeds, etc).
If they are the private documents of a business (or of anyone), then how is it, owing to the 5th, that the court has any authority to demand production? Investigators most certainly have authority to tap, surveil, and record, given a warrant. But demanding you produce potentially incriminating evidence is another matter.
How is demanding document production a) constitutional, and b) anything other than a dumb idea?
I used to work at a law firm. I never would have, but I could have forged whatever I wanted, or omitted documents from production. Pay someone well enough and there are many people who will be more than happy to do that. So the only thing stopping it is needing a small enough group of people in the conspiracy that can be controlled. That sounds about as secure as 'security through obscurity'.
If courts want access to private communications on demand, then they need to pony up and use their own servers and bandwidth for it. Oh wait, that would be a gross invasion of privacy, wouldn't it? Exactly. Which is a pretty good sign that the policy is flawed.
I appreciate that you have good motives. I'll share a little secret at the end of this post, but first I want to tell you something.
I'm a desktop tech at a local 7th-8th grade school, full time. We are not urban, very much redneck town. You might wonder how there's enough to do here full time with just two grades here. But actually, I stay pretty busy at just the 7th-8th campus, fixing software problems, reimaging machines, and fixing wireless which is the bane of my existence, and occasional /. of course.
We have probably around 40 classrooms. Each has at least two machines in it, usually three or four, and each has it's own printer. Of these classrooms, 2 are big labs, meaning 25 comps / 4 printers each, and about 6 or 7 are medium labs, meaning 10-15 comps / 2-3 printers each. We also have 2 laptop carts that float around, one with 25 laptops, and one with 20.
Can I make a humble suggestion? Most schools in my area have entirely too many machines in them. Now I'm not saying yours is that way. But realistically a school maybe needs one full computer lab per grade. Anything more is excessive IMO.
Not ten minutes ago I was looking at a laptop. This was a classroom with five students in it, although they sometimes have 10-20 in there. They have 20 laptops for this one classroom (all needing wireless access, sweet idea!). I'm sitting there looking at it, and as I'm waiting for it to ping a server, I briefly look around and notice something strange around me. There are coloring pages of different pictures on the table I'm sitting at. No, not like a US map that the kids can color each state or whatever. All out coloring pages, like Garfield and stuff like that (the cat, not the President).
Anywho, after I'm sitting there a few minutes, this kid (remember, 7th or 8th grader) comes and starts walking around by me, and I'm looking at him peripherally wondering what the hell he's doing. He walks around to the other side of me, waits a few seconds, chooses the Garfield coloring page, and goes and sits back down. That's right, because the laptops were messed up, we're going to color now.
Now I should probably get the laptops fixed chop chop so they can get back to learning right? Wrong. Computers in public schools have become nothing but a cheap babysitter. I'm not saying that it's the fault of the technology, I know that the fault lies with administrators, teachers, parents, legislatures, and all of us really.
I guess what I'm saying is, don't fall into the trap of throwing technology at the problem. You sound like a good guy, so you should know that what these kids need most is a good teacher, pencils, notebook paper, and a chalkboard. It's good what you're trying to do, but you need to know that teacher quality has gone way down, and if you give them technology, they'll most likely use it to babysit the kids rather than trying to educate them. I just wanted to give you fair warning.
Now for the secret. If you want this district to have superfluous technology coming out the ass, here's what you do. Tell them to find someone who has experience writing grant proposals. Advertise the position, get someone good, and pay them well. All of a sudden, you will have technology grants from government and corporate programs amounting in the tens of thousands to the millions. So the grant writer's salary will more than pay for itself. Well, at least in dollar terms, not necessarily in educational terms. Don't know what state you're in. This is Texas, so YMMV.
Sorry if that's being a downer, I just didn't want you to get caught by surprise.
This isn't a libertarian viewpoint but
You're missing something important. Why is our government granting monopolies to private businesses in the first place? It's unfortunate that a lot of people see what telcos, railcos, toll-road-cos, cablecos, etc are doing, and mistake it for a deficiency of the market. But it isn't a market, it never was in the first place. Because governmental bodies, whether, fed, state, or local, granted private businesses rights over the (private property of others | public property at large), whichever way you want to look at it.
I'll be the first to admit that most libertarians are blind to this. That doesn't mean that arguing the opposite of their position regarding markets has any validity at all. This has nothing to do with markets, because there is no market in this situations. There are only rent-seekers propped up by governments.
Just curious, but why do you say that about Russia? From everything I've seen, they have no intention of rolling over to Anglo-American dominated interests.
My understanding is that the Georgian stuff did away with a lot of potential for cooperation.
I'm not saying that a situation like trading allofmp3 for the WTO couldn't happen again, just that I don't see it as likely. You have something particular in mind?
Sweet! The internet connectivity will make it really easy to update the firmware!
Huh? $800 per seat? 800 what, USD? If those are client machines then that's insane. Even for Microsoft. I mean, the in-store windows pro for ~$200US gives you five licenses right? So I'd think, starting from $40US/license, then with an educational discount, then with a it's-frickin-Africa-and-we-have-to-pretend-to-have-a-heart-discount, it should be $10-20US max.
$800 license for Windows and Office? Are these server licenses maybe? Or is it a misprint and that's the price of an entire machine? I tried looking on Microsoft's licensing page, but their prices are obfuscated behind a 10-foot thick wall of PHB-speak. Ok, google produced this excel file that puts what is (I think) win pro at $311/4= $77.75US per seat. Can someone anointed with the licensing voodoo enlighten me please?
OT: the excel file linked from microsofts site is named: Copy%20of%20Price_List_Report.xls LOL
Yeah, and I think they started this recently, didn't they? I thought, screw it, I'll allow it for a while and give it a trial run.
Then, last night, I was trying to watch it and the video wouldn't start. Got down to where the only domain's scripts I had disabled was google-analytics.com. Maybe it was just a one time thing. But if I see the same behavior next time, well then, I guess no more DS or CR for me.
Then I'd think they'd be even more on the bad side the content lobby. There's gotta be just enough obfuscation in there that Average Joe doesn't want to screw with it.
This plan requires a laptop, flash drive, and some blank cds.
Have a laptop fully windows, nothing suspicious. Rip your movies to it like normal.
While on vacation, rip pictures to your laptop. Reboot into nix live on your flash drive. Tar all your pics, encrypt, and write a straight encrypted image to a cd. No fs on the cd. Then write "country mix" on it.
If anyone asks, it's a country mix you burned, but it must have gotten scratched or didn't burn right or something like that.
If you really wanted to go all out, you could even make it a real 9660 image. Just leave some space at the end, and tack on the encrypted tar.
Just wipe the pics from your laptop, and noone should be any the wiser. The downside is that you'll have to download some country/pop/some-sort-of-popular-bs for your mix.
* Peeking into your sexy neighbor's window while she's changing for a cheap thrill rather than going to a strip club.
* Breaking into a house that's are nicer than your own and living there when the normal tenants are known to be away on vacation before cleaning up after yourself and leaving the house as you found it.
-------------------
visible.frylock
Recording Industry Association of America
532 Lobbyist Way
Suite #39BS
Washington, DC 12666
Mr gnick:
We are intrigued by your ability to find privacy angles in seemingly unrelated phenomena. While traditionally we have made a focus of accusing private individuals of betraying society at large, this individual-on-individual view of the problem both interests and intrigues us.
We believe you could be a valuable addition to our team synergising our goals to become masters of not only social policy, but regulations of every action taken by any individual at any time. Please contact us. We would love to speak with you.
Sincerely,
Masters of the human species (The pricks formerly known as the RIAA).
Well, that is one part of the problem. Another huge problem IMO is that we don't have a house that's more proportional/based on consensus. 90% rule. 90% of the population is just dumb. What's more, this is distributed geographically evenly. (And for anyone who wants to chime in with a comment about the hippie blue states vs. the redneck red states, I'd like to remind you that blue states can be just as dogmatic.) Which means that in any house based on geography (use that word loosely *cough* districting *cough*) you're generally going to have to appeal to idiots.
One thing we need is a, say, 500 seat 3rd house. Nationwide vote. Approval voting or somesuch. 500 guys with the most votes get in. Then, to sweeten the deal, we could institute a 95% passing rule. If the bill doesn't have 95% affirmative votes, it dies the death it deserves. Actually, that'd be a good rule for the other 2 houses as well.
Then we could really vote for someone we want. Rather than some guy we just settle for because he happens to live (supposedly) nearby us. I understand the desire to have geographical based representation, and I'm not advocating removing that. But it isn't enough on its own.
This won't ever happen in our current system. But we need to start thinking about this stuff. Once our current system crashes, we're gonna have to replace it with something. And how did our current system start? By a lot of smart guys sitting around talking about their wishlists for government.
I've been thinking about how to reply to this. You're right of course. I guess the best answer I can come up with is that small differences (in IQ, for example) really don't seem to make much difference in the grand scheme. Japanese, for example, seem to be just as susceptible to human nature as anyone. IQ is not wisdom.
But these small things really weren't what I was trying to get at. In any event, the postulate of equality under the law trumps any differences, or at least it should.
Really? Seriously?
Is it still necessary to add the obligatory We Are Not Sexist bit to everything? In other news the ratio of males to females is higher among soldiers, firefighters, police officers, coal miners, and convicted felons.
Haven't we been over the sexist arguments to death by now? Is there ever going to come a time when we can talk about people without mentioning their gender, ethnicity, skin color, whatever? When we take it as a given that the median man/woman, black/white, Asian/Hispanic are equally as smart/dumb, and we don't have to hide behind PC language?
Thanks, I've been educated.
Maybe I just don't know enough, but why not get rid of numeric addresses altogether? I'm showing google as 64.233.187.99. Why should their web site be anything other than "google"? Why is it that "google" is 2nd class and 64.233.187.99 is 1st class?
How about:
I fail to see why numeric addresses and ports are necessary. Why not "sourceforge:ftp"? Every domain could be 32 chars, 32 bits each, thus 1024 bits per address. Sure, it's slightly more overhead for processing, but speed gains can quickly overcome that, right? Didn't DJB have something to say about a problem with IPv6 not allowing much in the way of transition capability. If we just provide proper transition, would address space even be a problem today?
Disclaimer: I don't believe the official story, but I'm not a "truther"
You talk about the design of the buildings being such that the collapse in a predictable way.
I have a CS degree, and I'm in EE right now, although I haven't gotten into any specifically engineering classes (just math/physics, etc.).
To someone like me who is a relative layman, what would I need to study to get a better idea of this? One the things that always got me about the twin towers and especially 7 was the relative symmetry of their collapse. From my thinking, the only way this would be possible is for all or most of the structural columns to fail simultaneously. But apparently you're saying that's not true. Any links you can give me would be appreciated.
You're right for non-business or small-business laptop owners. But I'd think that for large companies whose laptops are lost, the CYA factor (we're cool legally) is much more valuable than the ~$1000 hardware cost.
12,000 / 106 = avg 113 laptops / airport / week.
Seems a little high. The pdf doesn't mention what was counted in "lost/stolen" laptops. Do they count every time someone couldn't find their baggage on the belt and reported it (and it just so happened they had a laptop)?
Only thing the pdf says about it is this:
The article does say though that the study was sponsored by Dell supporting its ProSupport Mobility whatever. It claims that Ponemon conducted it independently.
Either way, encrypt your laptops, and try to setup RDC or somesuch, so you can prevent sensitive data from being cached. But encryption should stop casual thieves 99% of the time. I assume Dell's stuff they're selling is meant to wait until someone accesses the internet with a stolen laptop and try to track it that way. But shouldn't the top priority be to prevent data from being accessed in the first place?
What's more important? The data or the hardware cost?
I've been trying to understand this. Been reading the slides and some of the source, but I still don't get what he's referring to.
Correct me if I'm wrong. You're saying that the problem being treated is that, instead of locking an entire shared object, the atomic logic is pushed into the object itself so as to allow more granularity and thus less blocking? IOW, locking a specified portion of the structure rather than the entire structure?
Dont get the hate? It's the unnecessary complexity
Maybe this has gotten better since the time I was trying to get into Java (~3-4 years ago). But, for better or worse, first impressions are really important. And this kind of code is exactly what I think of when I think Java. I have some really bad memories related to Java (Swing, AWT, type conversion exceptions, Gui layouts (looking at you gridbox)). Some will leave and never come back. Some will try to come back and see if things have improved. Of those, some will return and some won't find anything to persuade them to change. Related to the topic at hand, the life cycle of a language and how it's managed can have a huge impact on the size, scope, and makeup of its userbase.
Oh, and I tried to blockquote that code here but the lameness filter stopped it ;)
No, not really. I wouldn't think *AA cares about this too much. They're not dumb, they know this is horribly inefficient at actually catching infringement. No, Christmas for them is more pervasive DRM. Trusted Computing is more their brand of legislative heaven.
No, this sounds like fun more for law enforcement orgs than hollywood.