Seems we're closer to agreeing with each other than I thought at first. Let me clarify my position a bit.
I don't believe that a functioning pure democracy could be implemented in the US at the moment, or that it could be implemented all at once. Had the current system not been so blatantly undemocratic however, it might have been possible to do it gradually. If the system actually gave representation in accordance with percentage of votes, a pure democracy could be phased in as a party that supplies the ability to participate in a pure democracy that controls that party. Anyone, member or not, would be able to vote on issues. Obviously this would have to be implemented using internet-based software for any efficacy to be achieved(Which brings up issues of acccess for the poorer parts of the population, but I'll consider that to be out of scope here.
It should be clear that everyone could not vote on every issue, you would have to set up some way to delegate your vote for when you yourself will not vote. This could be done far more flexibly than with the current system. For instance you might delegate your vote to an individual or party for a specific type of issue, and to another individual of party for issues of a differenc classification. At any time you could change these delegations, or vote yourself on an issue you are interested in. Classifications would be applied through a system similar to the one facilitating the actual voting, in order to avoid interest groups bypassing attention and getting legislation through the back door.
The short intro above just begins to skim the surface of what would need to be considered and implemented, but having read different proposals for the exact structure of such a system, I've yet to see mention of a problem that has not been solved already.
And as mentioned above, such a system can be phased into any existing representative democracy, that has representation relative to the amount of votes, so it can be tested and gradually perfected without having a majority of the votes.
Let's see, what is the number one requirement for making it to high office? Answer: Being willing to compromize your integrity in exchange for power. Be it through taking bribes(sorry contributions), doing hatchet jobs on the competition, or pretending to believe what you don't. The list of minor and major dishonesties that most politicians are guilty of is long, and few - if any - politicians get more honest as their career progresses. Many apparently believe that such people are to be trusted above the people in general. I never cease to be amazed by that.
I'm not denying that introducing any such system would be a quite painful process of maturing to the population, or that it would take time and that serious mistakes would probably be made. But how anyone could claim to believe in democracy yet prefer representative "democracy" is beyond me. That is not democracy in my opinion, it's a facade of democracy put in front of a system where the people with the most money have the real power. It's better than many alternatives, but calling it democracy is stretching the term to breaking limit.
You should care because it affects yourself, and humanity.
No, it does not.
How exactly does the distribution of wealth in the population manage avoid affecting both you and the population?
Funny; all the places where we see massive social unrest teetering on the edge of explosion is in places where the State has taken steps to ensure a "more equal distribution of income", such as France.
Let's see a list of all the recent instances of civil unrest along with your explanation of how they are all caused by socialism. You might start with African states.
In fact, How about you just try to find a single, at least semi-credible, source that says the unrest in France was caused by the state being socialist.
If the government does not intervene in the economy, how is the government deciding how wealth is "distributed"?
The answer to that is quite obvious if you've read any history what so ever. A state run that way will result in the great majority of the resources in the hands of a very small elite. It causes well known and utterly predictable problems along the lines of slums, decease, high crime rate etc. Allowing that to happen is a conscious decision.
Believe it or not, everyone that you speak to here is a real person. Being offensive does offend. Being nice does make you friends. That you assume that I mean Slashdot functionality when i mention friends is quite sad.
I get the same exakt result either with Konqueror or Firefox. An avi download. The one you for some reason need to "extract". No extensions involved. If you get some other results, well I'm so sorry for you. Perhaps you'd get better results trying to look for a solution rather than attacking and deriding anyone who points out that your assertions are incorrect. One thing is damned sure: You attitude is not making you any friends in this thread.
There's no AVI, there's a QVP shortcut to the same crunched version you can play in the Google Video Player, and two low-res, low-bitrate MP4 versions for iPod and PSP. Uhu? So why am I'm watching a 30MB large avi of the video right now that I got by clicking the download button?
Among other horrifying bits: To protect the rights-managed data resident in memory, the digital rights management operating system refuses to load an untrusted program into memory while the trusted application is executing or removes the data from memory before loading the untrusted program. If the untrusted program executes at the operating system level, such as a debugger, the digital rights management operating system renounces a trusted identity created for it by the computer processor when the computer was booted.
Any software Microsoft, or anyone who manages to hack them or bribe them, chooses can be automatically downloaded and executed without the actual owners of the computers being able to do anything about it, or even being able to detect that it is being done.
There doesn't need to be any extra back door. Treacherous(Trusted) Computing itself is the back door. With it installed Microsoft can literally do whatever they wish with your computers software. Whether or not they will abuse it is besides the point. The potential alone is completely unacceptable.
I don't believe in Windows backdoors any more that I believe that the Lenovo people are able to pull this off without anyone detecting it.
Agreed, for now, MS would most likely not be able to hide such things. But what about when Treacherous Computing comes around? I don't know about you, but Microsoft having their own hardware encrypted little processing enclaves, communicating over an encrypted channel with Microsoft, on most of the computers in the world gives me the shivers in a bad way.
Given my feelings on the topic of Microsoft I've got mixed feelings on this. As far as my mind goes it's clear cut though. Software/Idea/Method Patents are the business equivalent of weapons of mass destruction. They are already badly hampering progress in the software field. It's virtually impossible to write a useful program that does not infringe upon existing patents.
There is some semi-valid excuses for corporations stockpiling such patents for defensive purposes. There are no excuses for actually attacking with them.
Is there an echo here? Nah, must just be me. Anyhow. If you had RTA you'd know that microkernels are used for realtime systems. Feel free not to like it etc.
As to what happens to data about to be written the Minix site has this to say on restarting disk drivers: "This feature does not work for disk drivers at present, but in the next release the system will be able to recover even disk drivers, which will be shadowed in RAM. Driver recovery does not affect running processes." Shadow in ram. Seems reasonably clever to me. With the speed of drives vs RAM I'd not expect to se that cost noticably more than the extra RAM usage.
So, back on track: On a monolithic kernel: Disk driver goes down perhaps causing corruption. Reboot. All work in progress lost. Driver failure not logged so it can be debugged.
On a microkernel: Disk driver goes down perhaps causing corruption, disk driver restarted, the possible corruption just might have been fixed, error logged. Red lights blinking all over the place(since you want such warnings) notifying you that a driver failed. All work retained.
How is the monolithic scenario better here? I fail to see it. Perhaps I'll be running a microkernel some day, seems a kool idea to me.
Basing a war on lies is wrong for the person who does it, but our soldiers, the people GP was talking about, did not base their actions in this ware on lies. They based them on fairly accurate opinions of the Iraq situation built up over the last 12 years.
You know I'm amazed some americans still believe this.
We didn't attack Iraq, we attacked its government. There is a huge difference. The country as a whole still suffers consequences, but that doesn't diminish the distinction.
Yes, we agree on many points. And I'm glad we managed to keep this civil. The points we disagree on are rather big though:
I do not believe that the death of tens of thousands of civilians can be justified by claiming to be bringing democracy.
I do not believe that you can force democracy on a country. All you can achive that way is a pseudo colony with a pseudo democracy. The kind of situation leading to the current state of Africa.
I do not believe that Bush believed there were WMDs in Iraq, nor that Iraq was closely tied to Al Quaeda, nor that Iraq was any kind of threat to the US. I do believe that the "intelligence failures" were 100% intentional.
Enough of the splitting of hairs. Let's hear an honest opinion. Do you belive as I do that: Checks and Balances must me maintained. That a law that goes against the moral beliefs of a majority of the people is invalid. That the government is not above the law. That the aims cannot ever justify the means if those means include wars of aggression, gross injustices, or mass infringing on citizens freedom, including in freedom the intrinsically joined concept of privacy. That the law is a tool to be shaped and used by free people guided by their sense of justice. That any so called democratic society that forgets this has lost it's way.
Or do you believe, that the government should be almost whatever it likes, using a war, that IT STARTED UNILATERALLY WITH LIES AS MOTIVATION, as the excuse? That the stated aims justifies the means? That in fact the WORDS of KNOWN LIARS are more important than your own RIGHTS and those of all other Americans, not to mention Iraqis? That the law is a tool to be used by the gowernment to control the people.
This is what you appear to me to imply. Let's hear what you believe, and how you motivate it!
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
And where is the part about PRIVACY ? I missed that part.
That would be the part i marked in bold. The founding fathers could hardly predict the technological state of today, but the intent and spirit of the constitution is very clear. It hardly takes any great mind to realize how "papers and effects" translates into digital data.
The founding fathers were big believers in Checks and Balances. And for a very good reason. The government cannot be trusted! The founding fathers knew this very well. That's why the US has trial by jury. You did know that the jury has veto power over laws right? That's because the US is supposed to be a democracy and that is the final check and balance to be applied to a law. That the jury accepts it as just. The PATRIOT act does away with all that though. No jury. No trial. NO CONSTITUTION. NO HUMAN RIGHTS.
More violations of the Constitution probably occurred during Abraham Lincoln's four years as president than during any other cohesively defined era in American history. Many have pointed out that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to jail war protesters, shut down hundreds of newspapers that disagreed with his war, established a draft for the first time in American history (except in the seceded South, which had a draft a year earlier), instituted restrictions on firearms, and sent troops to violently suppress the New York draft riot. He also used the war to push through the "American System," a program of de facto nationalization of the transportation industry via massive subsidies to corporations that would agree to build "internal improvements" - railroads, waterways, and canals. The victory of the Union in 1865 not only established that, contrary to popular political theory in the antebellum era, the federal government was completely supreme over the states; it also established that a president could do literally anything he could get away with, no matter how many liberties were suspended, innocents jailed, and people killed in the process.
These are examples of abuses of power. It most certainly is not legal, and the fact that he got away with it means nothing except just that. Crimes that someone got away with do not change the constitution. They do not mean we should ignore or accept new crimes.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Someone may argue some legal mumbo jumbo that purports to show that the constitution doesn't really say what you just read above, but that just sophistry. What is meant is eminently clear:
1. Government officials get to trespass on the privacy of citizens only when they have a warrant. 2. A warrant shall only be issued when there is probable cause.
The NSA have grabbed the records of tens of millions of American citizens without a warrant. That's all you need to know.
Before someone shouts: "But the PATRIOT ACT!": All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The PATRIOT act. That name is one sick piece of propaganda. It goes against everything the constitution stands for. Speaking of the constitution: Anyone remember this quote?
I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. That's what Bush swore. Remember?
How about these quotes? Remember them?
They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Without Freedom of Thought there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as Public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories.
A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
I thought that was what Americans were supposed to stand for!
1. Classify operation X. 2. Have operatives in operation X perform illegal acts. 3. Block any investigation with the operation being classified as the excuse. 4. Cheer and laugh at the crowd as another piece of the American constitution and the American soul turns to ashes.
Anyway, that's irrelevant. What is relevant is that the NSA was caught red handed and is trying it's hardest to find and punish the people that exposed their illegal activities. So in short: The criminals are trying to track down the witness so they can silence/discredit him/her. Kudos to ABC for not being intimidated. Three cheers for the anyone brave enough to blow the wistle on corruption and abuse of power.
Real life includes 24-7 environments where spectacular crashes, which cause real monetary losses in the form of downtime, don't stack up too well against a fault-tolerant alternative.
Which makes me thin you don't have anything to do with production. Before it meets production you have unit tests, integration test and user acceptance tests that mean if you test right it'll b0rk before it gets to production, and that is a GoodThing (TM). Example I recently received a new version of some ETL mappings that were all set to rely on DB constraints to fail, ie the mappings would never themselves fail. This was picked up the minute we did the first run in integration test.... I was really pleased that my ETL code let this happen.... If you have so many failures that you downtime in prod you either have tech architecture problems, or don't test....
All true. For applications. In a perfect world. But, when that other application that runs on your server (You know: the one written by the guys doing those things you mentioned wrong or not at all), manages to crash driverX on the server you are going to be happy as hell that your application was not brought down. Your application did nothing wrong, why should the server and your application crash along with the bad application?
Remember, we are talking drivers here, not applications.
Because, as is pointed out again and again, it is NOT illegal to disobey illegal orders or to expose illegal activities. The government is NOT above the law no matter how much they like to believe they are.
What you are saying that is that the government may bypass any and all laws just by classifying the activity in question. That's utter nonsense. It is the moral duty of any citizen of any country to expose illegal acts by its government.
Also, as Moore's law is still going strong while CPU clock scaling is stalling we will, as you may have heard, see more cores on upcoming CPUs rather than faster cores. This means that we will be seeing a minor revolution in how software is built. It will become inpossible to write software with competitive performance without using threads.
The problems you (Russ) brought up are very real though, and there are several research projects in progress to try and adress them with "new" abstractions. One among many that is working on this is Herb Sutter, who gives his view on the matter here
Threads have their place, processes have their place.
A programmer that really cares about reliability and responsiveness will ensure that any code that may stall, such as network call etc, run in a separate thread so that it can be monitored for timeouts in a reasonable fashion, and so that it does not freeze the UI if the app has one. I would hate to see my webbrowser fetch just one item at a time from the net, and if MySQL forked a new process for each query to process.... well, that would... not be a good idea;)
The processes that a microkernel manage in this way are drivers. When your program does something bad it will crash just as hard on a microkernel as on a monolithic kernel. Microkernels just make sure that that crash is not in kernelspace so that your OS keeps on running.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems we're closer to agreeing with each other than I thought at first. Let me clarify my position a bit.
I don't believe that a functioning pure democracy could be implemented in the US at the moment, or that it could be implemented all at once. Had the current system not been so blatantly undemocratic however, it might have been possible to do it gradually. If the system actually gave representation in accordance with percentage of votes, a pure democracy could be phased in as a party that supplies the ability to participate in a pure democracy that controls that party. Anyone, member or not, would be able to vote on issues. Obviously this would have to be implemented using internet-based software for any efficacy to be achieved(Which brings up issues of acccess for the poorer parts of the population, but I'll consider that to be out of scope here.
It should be clear that everyone could not vote on every issue, you would have to set up some way to delegate your vote for when you yourself will not vote. This could be done far more flexibly than with the current system. For instance you might delegate your vote to an individual or party for a specific type of issue, and to another individual of party for issues of a differenc classification. At any time you could change these delegations, or vote yourself on an issue you are interested in. Classifications would be applied through a system similar to the one facilitating the actual voting, in order to avoid interest groups bypassing attention and getting legislation through the back door.
The short intro above just begins to skim the surface of what would need to be considered and implemented, but having read different proposals for the exact structure of such a system, I've yet to see mention of a problem that has not been solved already.
And as mentioned above, such a system can be phased into any existing representative democracy, that has representation relative to the amount of votes, so it can be tested and gradually perfected without having a majority of the votes.
Let's see, what is the number one requirement for making it to high office? Answer: Being willing to compromize your integrity in exchange for power. Be it through taking bribes(sorry contributions), doing hatchet jobs on the competition, or pretending to believe what you don't. The list of minor and major dishonesties that most politicians are guilty of is long, and few - if any - politicians get more honest as their career progresses. Many apparently believe that such people are to be trusted above the people in general. I never cease to be amazed by that.
I'm not denying that introducing any such system would be a quite painful process of maturing to the population, or that it would take time and that serious mistakes would probably be made. But how anyone could claim to believe in democracy yet prefer representative "democracy" is beyond me. That is not democracy in my opinion, it's a facade of democracy put in front of a system where the people with the most money have the real power. It's better than many alternatives, but calling it democracy is stretching the term to breaking limit.
How exactly does the distribution of wealth in the population manage avoid affecting both you and the population?
Let's see a list of all the recent instances of civil unrest along with your explanation of how they are all caused by socialism. You might start with African states.
In fact, How about you just try to find a single, at least semi-credible, source that says the unrest in France was caused by the state being socialist.
The answer to that is quite obvious if you've read any history what so ever. A state run that way will result in the great majority of the resources in the hands of a very small elite. It causes well known and utterly predictable problems along the lines of slums, decease, high crime rate etc. Allowing that to happen is a conscious decision.
Believe it or not, everyone that you speak to here is a real person. Being offensive does offend. Being nice does make you friends.
That you assume that I mean Slashdot functionality when i mention friends is quite sad.
I get the same exakt result either with Konqueror or Firefox. An avi download. The one you for some reason need to "extract". No extensions involved.
If you get some other results, well I'm so sorry for you. Perhaps you'd get better results trying to look for a solution rather than attacking and deriding anyone who points out that your assertions are incorrect. One thing is damned sure: You attitude is not making you any friends in this thread.
There's no AVI, there's a QVP shortcut to the same crunched version you can play in the Google Video Player, and two low-res, low-bitrate MP4 versions for iPod and PSP.
Uhu? So why am I'm watching a 30MB large avi of the video right now that I got by clicking the download button?
I suggest you have a look at Microsofts patent for a Digital rights management operating system.
Among other horrifying bits:
To protect the rights-managed data resident in memory, the digital rights management operating system refuses to load an untrusted program into memory while the trusted application is executing or removes the data from memory before loading the untrusted program. If the untrusted program executes at the operating system level, such as a debugger, the digital rights management operating system renounces a trusted identity created for it by the computer processor when the computer was booted.
Trusted Computing doesn't enable them to do anything they can't do today.
As you yourself say below: Treacherous Computing enables them to make it UNDETECTABLE. .
Trusted Computing allows someone else to perhaps put an undetectable rootkit on your machine,
Indeed.
Any software Microsoft, or anyone who manages to hack them or bribe them, chooses can be automatically downloaded and executed without the actual owners of the computers being able to do anything about it, or even being able to detect that it is being done.
There doesn't need to be any extra back door. Treacherous(Trusted) Computing itself is the back door. With it installed Microsoft can literally do whatever they wish with your computers software. Whether or not they will abuse it is besides the point. The potential alone is completely unacceptable.
I don't believe in Windows backdoors any more that I believe that the Lenovo people are able to pull this off without anyone detecting it.
Agreed, for now, MS would most likely not be able to hide such things. But what about when Treacherous Computing comes around?
I don't know about you, but Microsoft having their own hardware encrypted little processing enclaves, communicating over an encrypted channel with Microsoft, on most of the computers in the world gives me the shivers in a bad way.
Given my feelings on the topic of Microsoft I've got mixed feelings on this. As far as my mind goes it's clear cut though. Software/Idea/Method Patents are the business equivalent of weapons of mass destruction. They are already badly hampering progress in the software field. It's virtually impossible to write a useful program that does not infringe upon existing patents.
There is some semi-valid excuses for corporations stockpiling such patents for defensive purposes. There are no excuses for actually attacking with them.
Is there an echo here? Nah, must just be me.
Anyhow. If you had RTA you'd know that microkernels are used for realtime systems. Feel free not to like it etc.
As to what happens to data about to be written the Minix site has this to say on restarting disk drivers:
"This feature does not work for disk drivers at present, but in the next release the system will be able to recover even disk drivers, which will be shadowed in RAM. Driver recovery does not affect running processes."
Shadow in ram. Seems reasonably clever to me. With the speed of drives vs RAM I'd not expect to se that cost noticably more than the extra RAM usage.
So, back on track:
On a monolithic kernel: Disk driver goes down perhaps causing corruption. Reboot. All work in progress lost. Driver failure not logged so it can be debugged.
On a microkernel: Disk driver goes down perhaps causing corruption, disk driver restarted, the possible corruption just might have been fixed, error logged. Red lights blinking all over the place(since you want such warnings) notifying you that a driver failed. All work retained.
How is the monolithic scenario better here? I fail to see it.
Perhaps I'll be running a microkernel some day, seems a kool idea to me.
Basing a war on lies is wrong for the person who does it, but our soldiers, the people GP was talking about, did not base their actions in this ware on lies. They based them on fairly accurate opinions of the Iraq situation built up over the last 12 years.
You know I'm amazed some americans still believe this.
The Downing street memo
Doubts, dissent stripped from public version of Iraq assessment
CIA leak illustrates selective use of intelligence on Iraq
Bush talking on the political advantages of war in 99
We didn't attack Iraq, we attacked its government. There is a huge difference. The country as a whole still suffers consequences, but that doesn't diminish the distinction.
The people of Iraq may not agree. I sure as hell don't. Collateral damage is newspeak:
U.S. invasion responsible deaths of over 250,000 civilians in Iraq
THE REAL WMD'S IN IRAQ - OURS
Displaced Iraqis 'living like animals'
'unknown Americans' are provoking civil war in Iraq
The Missing Girls of Iraq
Yes, we agree on many points. And I'm glad we managed to keep this civil. The points we disagree on are rather big though:
I do not believe that the death of tens of thousands of civilians can be justified by claiming to be bringing democracy.
I do not believe that you can force democracy on a country. All you can achive that way is a pseudo colony with a pseudo democracy. The kind of situation leading to the current state of Africa.
I do not believe that Bush believed there were WMDs in Iraq, nor that Iraq was closely tied to Al Quaeda, nor that Iraq was any kind of threat to the US.
I do believe that the "intelligence failures" were 100% intentional.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-15936 07,00.html
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/sp ecial_packages/iraq/intelligence/11901380.htm
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/sp ecial_packages/iraq/intelligence/12995512.htm
I do not believe that Bush invaded Iraq for humanitarian reasons.
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
This count is most likely closer to the truth:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11 674.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2006/05/12/wirq12.xml
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2162249, 00.html
http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1 186519,00.html
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArti cle.asp?articleID=8218
The list is endless but I'll stop here.
I believe that Bush does and will continue to do exactly whatever he feels will benefit him, with no concern what so ever for how many dies for his gain. Not that you actually need anything but his actions and his statements to prove this, but here are more links:
http://downingstreetmemo.com/archive/2004-10-31-Ho ustonChron-Herskowitz/
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12 885.htm
I believe that Bush is now planning his next war of aggression.
http://www.zaman.com/?bl=international&alt=&trh=20 060511&hn=33036
http://www.rense.com/general71/tdarg.htm
http://wakeupfromyourslumber.blogspot.com/2006/05/ us-feverishly-works-to-frame-iran_13.html
http://newswire.indymedia.org/en/2006/05/839133.sh tml
http://english.people.com.cn/200605/13/eng20060513 _265252.html
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Condoleeza_Rice_ admits_she_responded_to_0509.html
"should be almost whatever it likes"
Should have been:
"should be allowed to do almost whatever it likes"
Enough of the splitting of hairs. Let's hear an honest opinion. Do you belive as I do that:
Checks and Balances must me maintained.
That a law that goes against the moral beliefs of a majority of the people is invalid.
That the government is not above the law.
That the aims cannot ever justify the means if those means include wars of aggression, gross injustices, or mass infringing on citizens freedom, including in freedom the intrinsically joined concept of privacy.
That the law is a tool to be shaped and used by free people guided by their sense of justice.
That any so called democratic society that forgets this has lost it's way.
Or do you believe, that the government should be almost whatever it likes, using a war, that IT STARTED UNILATERALLY WITH LIES AS MOTIVATION, as the excuse?
That the stated aims justifies the means?
That in fact the WORDS of KNOWN LIARS are more important than your own RIGHTS and those of all other Americans, not to mention Iraqis?
That the law is a tool to be used by the gowernment to control the people.
This is what you appear to me to imply. Let's hear what you believe, and how you motivate it!
That would be the part i marked in bold. The founding fathers could hardly predict the technological state of today, but the intent and spirit of the constitution is very clear. It hardly takes any great mind to realize how "papers and effects" translates into digital data.
The founding fathers were big believers in Checks and Balances. And for a very good reason. The government cannot be trusted! The founding fathers knew this very well.
That's why the US has trial by jury. You did know that the jury has veto power over laws right? That's because the US is supposed to be a democracy and that is the final check and balance to be applied to a law. That the jury accepts it as just. The PATRIOT act does away with all that though. No jury. No trial. NO CONSTITUTION. NO HUMAN RIGHTS.
More violations of the Constitution probably occurred during Abraham Lincoln's four years as president than during any other cohesively defined era in American history. Many have pointed out that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to jail war protesters, shut down hundreds of newspapers that disagreed with his war, established a draft for the first time in American history (except in the seceded South, which had a draft a year earlier), instituted restrictions on firearms, and sent troops to violently suppress the New York draft riot. He also used the war to push through the "American System," a program of de facto nationalization of the transportation industry via massive subsidies to corporations that would agree to build "internal improvements" - railroads, waterways, and canals. The victory of the Union in 1865 not only established that, contrary to popular political theory in the antebellum era, the federal government was completely supreme over the states; it also established that a president could do literally anything he could get away with, no matter how many liberties were suspended, innocents jailed, and people killed in the process.
These are examples of abuses of power. It most certainly is not legal, and the fact that he got away with it means nothing except just that. Crimes that someone got away with do not change the constitution. They do not mean we should ignore or accept new crimes.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Someone may argue some legal mumbo jumbo that purports to show that the constitution doesn't really say what you just read above, but that just sophistry. What is meant is eminently clear:
1. Government officials get to trespass on the privacy of citizens only when they have a warrant.
2. A warrant shall only be issued when there is probable cause.
The NSA have grabbed the records of tens of millions of American citizens without a warrant. That's all you need to know.
Before someone shouts: "But the PATRIOT ACT!":
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The PATRIOT act. That name is one sick piece of propaganda. It goes against everything the constitution stands for. Speaking of the constitution: Anyone remember this quote?
I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
That's what Bush swore. Remember?
How about these quotes? Remember them?
They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Without Freedom of Thought there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as Public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories.
A free people claim their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
I thought that was what Americans were supposed to stand for!
1. Classify operation X.
2. Have operatives in operation X perform illegal acts.
3. Block any investigation with the operation being classified as the excuse.
4. Cheer and laugh at the crowd as another piece of the American constitution and the American soul turns to ashes.
That's not what I heard
Anyway, that's irrelevant. What is relevant is that the NSA was caught red handed and is trying it's hardest to find and punish the people that exposed their illegal activities.
So in short: The criminals are trying to track down the witness so they can silence/discredit him/her. Kudos to ABC for not being intimidated.
Three cheers for the anyone brave enough to blow the wistle on corruption and abuse of power.
All true. For applications. In a perfect world. But, when that other application that runs on your server (You know: the one written by the guys doing those things you mentioned wrong or not at all), manages to crash driverX on the server you are going to be happy as hell that your application was not brought down. Your application did nothing wrong, why should the server and your application crash along with the bad application?
Remember, we are talking drivers here, not applications.
Because, as is pointed out again and again, it is NOT illegal to disobey illegal orders or to expose illegal activities. The government is NOT above the law no matter how much they like to believe they are.
What you are saying that is that the government may bypass any and all laws just by classifying the activity in question. That's utter nonsense. It is the moral duty of any citizen of any country to expose illegal acts by its government.
Also, as Moore's law is still going strong while CPU clock scaling is stalling we will, as you may have heard, see more cores on upcoming CPUs rather than faster cores. This means that we will be seeing a minor revolution in how software is built. It will become inpossible to write software with competitive performance without using threads.
The problems you (Russ) brought up are very real though, and there are several research projects in progress to try and adress them with "new" abstractions. One among many that is working on this is Herb Sutter, who gives his view on the matter here
Threads have their place, processes have their place.
;)
A programmer that really cares about reliability and responsiveness will ensure that any code that may stall, such as network call etc, run in a separate thread so that it can be monitored for timeouts in a reasonable fashion, and so that it does not freeze the UI if the app has one. I would hate to see my webbrowser fetch just one item at a time from the net, and if MySQL forked a new process for each query to process.... well, that would... not be a good idea
The processes that a microkernel manage in this way are drivers. When your program does something bad it will crash just as hard on a microkernel as on a monolithic kernel. Microkernels just make sure that that crash is not in kernelspace so that your OS keeps on running.