I've always wanted to take a road trip south out of the US. Drive to South America, see the Amazon, Brazil, and Argentina, visit the telescopes in Chile, swing back through Peru and look at Incan ruins. But it has never seemed even remotely safe to try it. Also, it still isn't possible to drive the entire distance. There is no road connection between Panama and Columbia, so you must employ a ferry, or stop and turn around there. Is that why your plan is to turn back there? I hear that Columbia is especially unsafe, and your ferry ride should bypass that entire nation. A gringo driving through Columbia is just asking to be kidnapped and held for ransom.

It's a different world, this attitude of dealing with corruption by playing along, working within this system and its unwritten rules. Wouldn't be better to change the system, rather than help perpetuate it by participating, no matter how unwillingly? McAfee wanted to travel, without waiting for such corruption to be cleaned up. Admittedly the wait may be a very long one. The West has changed its approach in recent years. Now businesses based in the West have many more legal obstacles against playing the game and bribing authorities, on the idea that corruption will never be cleaned up as long as the powerful can so easily profit from it, and that allowing it to go on is too costly to everyone else.

Yes, and disingenuousness. They say they are ending the free service because there is too much abuse. Google, Yahoo, MS, and others can still offer free email, despite all the spam, but Dyn can't continue the free version of a service that is much simpler and easier to manage than email? And, wasn't there plenty of abuse 5 years ago, 10 years ago? They could handle it then, and now they can't?

That's like saying the US didn't need railroads either. Before the Ttranscontinental, there were 3 basic ways to travel between the east and west coasts. 1) Overland. Time: almost 6 months at first, then down to 4 months as the trails improved. Might not make it if attacked by Indians, or you became ill with cholera, or you took a wrong turn and ended up lost and dying of thirst in a desert, or trapped and starving and frozen in a snowed shut mountain pass. 2) Take ship around the southern tip of South America. Time: 4 months. Safer than overland, but still somewhat risky, uncomfortable, and more expensive. 3) Take ship to Panama, cross, then continue on another ship. Time: 1 month, if lucky and there was a ship wih room on the other side. The Transcontinental took 1 week. Also, the army had to maintain and man forts all over the west, at great expense, to protect citizens from Indians. Took too long to travel, they had to be near at hand. When the railroad came and "annihilated space and time", the forts were no longer useful and were quickly abandoned.

Like the railroads did, the Internet saves huge amounts of time and money. The phone system can't gather and deliver data at any efficiently remotely approaching the Internet. Call brokers to check commodity prices, are you mad? Takes many hours to check everywhere by phone, by which time some prices would change. Instead, what farmers did was simply not check everywhere, they would only check a few local dealers. And as for snail mail, please. Same day delivery is fantastic, for goods. But for information, it is hopelessly outclassed.

I thought it was: 1st world = the West-- the US and its allies, 2nd world = USSR and its allies, 3rd world = non aligned-- all the nations that weren't interested and didn't want to take sides in the Cold War, and even resisted pressure to choose a side. Most of them also happened to be very poor, which reduced the interest of the 2 sides in them.

Among the 5 democratic candidates for a US Senate seat where I live was one who campaigned on the idea that Obama was trying to impart Islamic values to our school children, and should be impeached. She got 2nd place, and will be facing the 1st place candidate in a runoff.

How do we get through to supporters of that sort of thing just how uncool that is?

This kind of anti-social road operation is common. Many merchants want people sitting at the intersections where their stores are, with nothing to look at but the stores. Rich and politically well connected businesses can get traffic lights added to the entrance of their businesses. I know of at least one country club that serves the superrich, and not only did they get a stoplight, it also severly favors their entrance, truning green for them the instant anyone wants out, and screw the 6 lanes of traffic on the major street. Toll road operators want free side roads to be inadequate, badly maintained, and jammed with traffic lights. Revenue hungry cities are always running speed traps, red light camera programs, and the like, and calculatedly neglecting problems such as foliage that blocks signs.

Charles City, Iowa had a place where 3 streets cross the highway, and all 3 have traffic lights. But, not the same style of traffic light. The 2 on the end have the lights hanging from arms that reach over the highway, while the middle one has only a vertical post and buildings right at the corner, all which makes it harder to see. Of course the lights are mistimed, so that when the 2 on the end turn green, the one in the middle turns red. There's a bypass now. Olney, Texas had 3 lights, 2 in their tiny downtown area, and 1 about a mile down the highway, nearly impossible to see because it was a temporary that hung from a wire, and the trees on either side had grown out over the highway and obscured the traffic light. You could not see the light until you were less than a block away, and even then, you had to know where to look. I heard an allegation that completion of I49 through Alexandria, Louisiana was delayed for several years by a local politician who owned a restaurant on the old road.

Yes. Manufacturers are always cutting. They'll cheapen everything they can. That in itself is not bad, but then they don't do adequate testing, because that costs money too. Nor do they calculate the costs correctly. Often they can't be bothered to consider future costs. All that matters is that the up front cost is as low as possible. They hope they can dodge having to do a massive recall a few years later.

In the late 1980s, Ford got so cheap with heater cores that in as little as 5 years, they all developed leaks. Saw this in an '88 Escort and an '88 Grand Marquis. That Escort was junk. The too small ball joints and too small clutch were worn out after just 50,000 miles, the light switch failed, the fittings for the A/C used O-rings that failed in a few years, the plastic used in the bumpers turned brittle and would crack under the least pressure after a few years in the sun, the ignition system failed regularly, and even the steering failed once. I don't mean only that the power steering went out, no, I mean that the rack and pinion were so underdesigned that they wore out in less than 150,000 miles and could not keep the 2 front wheels pointing in the same direction! Had the car been on a highway when that happened, it could've killed. A few more cents spent on these items would have made for a much, much better car. Was stupid to introduce such huge problems to save so little.

To add to the insanity, Ford did splurge on idiotic cosmetics. That Escort had a worthless tail fin and spoilers, and the visors had lit vanity mirrors. They couldn't even do the vanity mirrors right. They were covered with a flap held on by little pieces of velcro glued to the visor. When the visor was down and receiving a good bit of sunlight, the glue would soften up and release the flap, which would flop down and block the driver's view of the road. If the car was left parked with the visor down, the same thing would happen, and the little lights would come on. If away from the car for a few hours, the users would discover the battery was drained when they got back.

I'm not pretending, I'm saying, right out, that copying is not stealing. Some kinds of copying are illegal. Some kinds of copying may be immoral or unethical or unfair regardless of legality. But copying is not stealing.

But we are at an impasse. If we can't agree on whether copying is or is not theft, and why, then further discussion is pointless. I think years from now, the public will embrace sharing as a natural right, and we will devise other ways to compensate artists and scientists. Trying to control copying, in order to fairly compensate creators, isn't working. Surely we can find and use some other means. That's what the debate is really about.

Vandalism, arson, speeding, blasphemy, slander, theft, fraud, and copying are all different. None of these should be lumped together as somehow different forms of stealing, not even fraud, vandalism or copying. While the goal of most fraud may be theft, it isn't always. Money is not the only thing that can be forged. So can driver's licenses and identification papers. Throwing a brick through your window is not stealing, it is vandalism. You lost a window, and no one gained it, whereas copying is the other way around. Someone gains something and you lose nothing. Nor should all of these be crimes. Blasphemy is no longer a crriminal act in much of the world. And what have you to say about the distinction between the material and the immaterial? These different things should have different legal treatment.

I did not say a DDoS was okay. I said that what could seem to be a DoS (with one 'D') should be okay. The principle is that any use that is easily handled by a good system should not be regarded as bad. If the system is poor and can't handle some usage that could be handled by a known better system within reason, that is the fault of the system, not the usage.

No. Journals are no longer expensive to run. Neither the authors nor the reviewers receive any compensation from the publishers. Distribution, except for the obsolete dead tree kind, is now so cheap as to be close to zero cost. The publishers have sunk to being lowly, rent seeking gatekeepers who contribute no value.

I agree, and am glad you also see their fees as outrageous.

Those are jobs for our public libraries.

Let's say it again: copying is not stealing. You keep using that word "steal" because... you're trying to strengthen your argument, which is that Swartz was a jerk?

To further this assertion that Swartz was a jerk, you say that he effectively did a Denial of Service attack, though you concede that it was probaly not intentional. Let's look at that charge a little more. If some high school kid crashes the school web server by repeatedly hitting F5, is the kid in the wrong? Or, maybe, you know, the people who set up the system did a bad job and as soon as a problem crops up, go on a witch hunt. JSTOR was not hit with a DDoS. Systems should be robust enough to handle requests in a fair fashion. Maybe the ability to handle a DDoS is asking too much, but this was a single user. Don't join the witch hunt!

Seems also that you are not thinking of JSTOR at all. Were they jerks? Absolutely! They should never have locked away all that research that we paid for. It should be freely available, perhaps in torrents. JSTOR's entire model is an offense to freedom and a slap in the face to us all. And they could have done a better job on the technical side, and made their service able to handle a more demanding load. It's not like we haven't done loads of research into operating systems and task scheduling. Why do you give JSTOR a free pass? They're as much or more at fault for your friends' difficulties in accessing research.

I don't think we know enough to make that claim that programming is intrinsically hard.

Writing used to be hard. In the Bronze Age, literacy was rare. In some societies, only priests knew how to read and write. The idea of trying to educate everyone and push literacy close to 100% was ridiculous. Hieroglyphic and Cuneiform languages were just too hard. Even for people who could achieve literacy, many did not. They didn't have time. Survival took a lot more of everyone's time. The Phonecians radically changed that with the idea of a 'phonetic' written language, around the start of the Iron Age. It became possible for many more people to become literate. Another problem early civilizations had was their primitive numbering systems. No concept of zero. Algorithms to do basic arithmetic in a numbering system like the Roman one are more complicated, harder to learn, and an all around drag on every engineering and scientific endeavor.

That's where we're at with programing now. Bronze Age programming languages, because we haven't yet figured out how to do it more simply. We have this feeling it should be easier, but we don't know how to make it easier.

Javascript sure blew that one. It is easier to create a global variable than a local variable thanks to a simple little syntax requirement. Have to declare a variable local with a "var" keyword. Global variables can just be used.

Why did the Javascript designers do it that way? Did they carefully analyze the frequency and usefulness of global vs local, and conclude global is more popular and common? Do they disagree with the idea of limiting scope to the minimum necessary? Probably none of those. They just threw the language together in a hurry. I don't know the history, but I would guess globals were the only kind of variable Javascript had originally.

No, actually Social Security is not a budget buster. It is funded entirely through payroll taxes specifically for Social Security, and interest paid on that money when the government borrows it (which is all the time), and none of its money comes from general revenue or borrowing. Those people who claim SS is an entitlement and a disaster for the budget have ulterior motives. They aren't interested in SS per se, they are only interested in that big pile of money SS has. Currently, SS has about $2.7 trillion in reserve. If they can push SS into crisis, or manufacture a fake crisis and convince the public it is real, to shake loose some of that money, they will. This has already been done to some lesser retirement funds, pension plans and the like. Most of us have heard that SS is in trouble and will go bankrupt sometime around 2030 unless changes are made. There have been calls to privatize SS and invest its money in the stock market. Such an event, especially if it was done over a short period of time, would pump the stock market so high it would make the housing bubble of 2007 look petty. The finance industry would go nuts and pocket immense amounts of our wealth, then, when the inevitable fall and crash comes, hope to quietly walk away and leave us to pick up the pieces.

Only reason I can think to work in security is because it's hot, been hot since 9/11. $. But interesting? It can be, if you can stay away from the idiots. Useful? Maybe, if politics can be kept out of it. But that's the point-- the people with the purse strings are political and stupid. Look how Microsoft has handled security. Norton/Symantec once said that they would go out of business if MS ever fixed Windows. If I were to work in security, the very last place I would choose is anti-malware software for Windows because it is such a total waste of effort to slap bandaids on fundamentally broken models.

People want perfect security, until it becomes inconvenient, then they choose convenience over security and go blame the security people. Who finds SELinux more useful than painful? The moment SELinux prevents an app from functioning is the moment the user dumps the security. MS twists the meaning of security, and tries to sell their customers the idea that secuirty for MS against them being naughty pirates is really security for everyone. Uncle Bill will make sure you don't commit piracy and get sued, don't you feel safer now? Years ago, the Prodigy Internet service promised to keep their customers safe from porn, profanity and other naughtiness and found that they could not. The meaning of security became so broad it was nearly useless. Everything can be cast as a security issue. I love Google's Evil Bit idea. Makes it clearer that just trying to figure out which info is "evil" is hard. Others want unbreakable security with backdoors (hello there NSA!).

The people who want security are suspicious and distrustful of security workers. Paranoid. It doesn't take much for them to turn against their own security people. They'll do something that wrecks security, then blame it on the security workers and get away with it. As for security workers themselves, maybe some of them go off the deep end and hide in jungles and do other weird stuff that makes the stuffed shirts doubt their fitness to work in security.