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Schools like this Singapore school which claims that its "genuine" parents are "distressed" by the internet and they needed to do something about it. So they have engaged lawyers, of course paid for by the parents themselves without their consent (or manufactured consent).

Read at Techdirt: Indian School in Singapore sues parent for anonymous comments on his blog

I have been following this for a while. The most recent censorship attempt takes the form of a request to the CERT of India government to ban blogs in Singapore, Malaysia and India:
Techgoss story: Indian school asks CERT to ban three blogs in three countries

View the blogs before they are vaporized ! Archive them at your risk of course !
Blogs under censorship attack: Blog 1, from Singapore which is a "Parents Forum/Blog",
Blog 2, from Malaysia which is a "GIIS Malaysia Parents" blog, and
Blog 3, from India which is a "RSK Parents Forum" blog.

I am sure the school will argue that private education in India needs such drastic measures !

Schools like this Singapore school which claims that its "genuine" parents are "distressed" by the internet and they needed to do something about it. So they have engaged lawyers, of course paid for by the parents themselves without their consent (or manufactured consent).

Read at Techdirt: Indian School in Singapore sues parent for anonymous comments on his blog

I have been following this for a while. The most recent censorship attempt takes the form of a request to the CERT of India government to ban blogs in Singapore, Malaysia and India:
Techgoss story: Indian school asks CERT to ban three blogs in three countries

View the blogs before they are vaporized ! Archive them at your risk of course !
Blogs under censorship attack: Blog 1, from Singapore which is a "Parents Forum/Blog",
Blog 2, from Malaysia which is a "GIIS Malaysia Parents" blog, and
Blog 3, from India which is a "RSK Parents Forum" blog.

I am sure the school will argue that private education in India needs such drastic measures !

Schools like this Singapore school which claims that its "genuine" parents are "distressed" by the internet and they needed to do something about it. So they have engaged lawyers, of course paid for by the parents themselves without their consent (or manufactured consent).

Read at Techdirt: Indian School in Singapore sues parent for anonymous comments on his blog

I have been following this for a while. The most recent censorship attempt takes the form of a request to the CERT of India government to ban blogs in Singapore, Malaysia and India:
Techgoss story: Indian school asks CERT to ban three blogs in three countries

View the blogs before they are vaporized ! Archive them at your risk of course !
Blogs under censorship attack: Blog 1, from Singapore which is a "Parents Forum/Blog",
Blog 2, from Malaysia which is a "GIIS Malaysia Parents" blog, and
Blog 3, from India which is a "RSK Parents Forum" blog.

I am sure the school will argue that private education in India needs such drastic measures !

Bananas, not sure about their variability, but most varieties of them are also reproduced asexually.

All commercial varieties of banana are reproduced asexually, as they are triploid and sterile; the random seed may occasionally occur, but very rarely.

Wild bananas are seed producing, see pictures here.

Would greatly appreciate if someone could please add this information onto the USB dead drops in my absense (after all the dead drops need some juicy content with government secrets):
http://www.mediafire.com/?09tf66ybzurpr0s
http://cid-3bfa0ee4c6f361ff.office.live.com/browse.aspx/Public
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B9K1bpZ8L19dNTk1YmE1NTctYTYwZC00ZjdjLWEzZGUtNDY1MzQ5ODVmNTQ0
http://cid-3bfa0ee4c6f361ff.photos.live.com/
http://evidenceagainstusgovernment.blogspot.com/
http://newworldordersatanicslavery.blogspot.com/

Would greatly appreciate if someone could please add this information onto the USB dead drops in my absense (after all the dead drops need some juicy content with government secrets):
http://www.mediafire.com/?09tf66ybzurpr0s
http://cid-3bfa0ee4c6f361ff.office.live.com/browse.aspx/Public
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B9K1bpZ8L19dNTk1YmE1NTctYTYwZC00ZjdjLWEzZGUtNDY1MzQ5ODVmNTQ0
http://cid-3bfa0ee4c6f361ff.photos.live.com/
http://evidenceagainstusgovernment.blogspot.com/
http://newworldordersatanicslavery.blogspot.com/

Already predicted before you

False. It may have been true at one time, but even Sarah Palin is pro-decriminalization, if not outright legalization

She said "If we're talking about pot, I'm not for the legalization of pot". Her position appears to be aligned with those that think the growers and supply lines should be illegal, and police should continue to target those, but not target individuals smoking a joint in their own homes. There are huge problems with that approach, as it leaves the supply side under the control of criminals.

I think what you mean is "Republican politicians".

Maybe. Libertarian thoughts and liberal social attitudes are becoming more mainstream in conservative society. The world is changing, and attitudes towards cannabis are softening, but this conservative response is still quite typical.

The dude walking in front of her. She is using an earphone. What this film needs is a bigger earphone. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_qoUwETXaAb0/Sfpx3qpsY0I/AAAAAAAADEw/qZ2KJgIZzrw/s1600-h/bigger-ear-horn.gif

THANK YOU!

This is so far from a secret it's not even funny. Imagine if we'd only just discovered what those two pins on the connector did?

Hell, even the breakout board the guy (who's original, non full page ad-encumbered article can be found here) bought has the bloody serial pins labelled.

It's not remotely surprising that an embedded device has a UART on it. It's even less surprising that a device designed to interface with very simple dock devices has a UART exposed via its peripheral connector.

What is surprising is that the combination of breakout board and RS232 line driver somehow managed to be bigger than the phone.

If you'd like to read the article instead of Computer World's stupid-ass slide show, it's at http://resolvehax.blogspot.com/2010/10/iphone-serial-port.html

Due to the Von Neuman bottleneck, most of the transistors in a computer are in the RAM, which is idle except for the row/column being accessed at a given time. The bitgrid gets around this by building a grid of look up tables which operate on 4 bits in and 4 bits. It should be quite easy to build a chip which has a million of these tables in a 1000x1000 grid. This would allow data to flow off the edges at a result per clock cycle.... which in modern CMOS is at least 1 Ghz.

Finding applications to run on a theoretical chip isn't easy... but synthetic focus imagery comes to mind. Imagine a survey plane with an array of cameras, generating 3d imagery with a resolution of 1 centimeter in all 3 dimensions, at a speed of 1000 kph at a height of 15,000 meters, giving a swath 5 km wide.... that's 14 Gigapixels/second of final product. I believe it's feasible to do this with the bit grid chip.

Anyone want to sponsor the research? If not, I'll stick to my day job.

I've got alot of mopey.

The OP worded it badly

What they meant is that most CMSes store the password in the database as an MD5 (or some other algorithm) hash. The technique he's describing is to hash the password client-side and send the MD5 over the wire to the server, which can then compare it to what's stored in the database to grant access.

Still, while better than nothing, there are a few problems with this, including:

• Using MD5 or any other algorithm is susceptible to so-called "rainbow table" attacks. For example, if I see 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 floating across the wire, I know the user's password without any fancy decryption techniques. There are rainbow tables for just about every algorithm out there. This can be thwarted by adding a password "salt."
• It depends on the user having javascript enabled. While most browsers do, some people (like me) use things like FlashBlock to avoid annoyances and sundry evil.
• As mentioned above, it does little to counter replay attacks, where someone who has sniffed the MD5 hash off the wire simply sends it to the server and impersonates the user. To mitigate that, you could in theory use some time-based salt, like the UTC epoch timestamp or a one-off seed sent from the server.

While there are ways around it, really, the simplest thing to do is simply use SSL for secure connections. Truth is, the smartest thing to do is use combinations of all of the above, because even SSL isn't guaranteed to be secure if you don't have absolute control over the hardware you are browsing on.

Might these be the numbers you are looking for? http://theblogprof.blogspot.com/2010/05/video-of-clinton-rich-are-not-paying.html

MS is a large company that does not react quickly. They have skilled people but are hampered by management. One of the reasons the Kin failed was that it was 18 months late. It was decisions by management that caused problems. The original idea was they wanted to quickly release a product. If MS had tried to build one from scratch it would have taken years. Thus MS bought Danger. Danger made the HipTop (commonly known as the SideKick) and the original plan was to release a SideKick successor within 6 months.

[Now all of the following are rumors as no one in MS has officially confirmed them. You can read about them by googling.]

But then came the management decisions that would doom it. SideKick applications ran on Java. Being MS, it was decided that Windows CE would be used. That decision alone would push back product launch by many months. There was also rumors of infighting. The head of Windows Mobile didn't want the Kin so he did not allocate any resources to help the Kin team (Project Pink). So the team had to implement an OS with which they were not familiar without the help of those that knew the OS well.

As the project became hopelessly delayed, features like the App store were cut in order to make some sort of release date. Also since the phone was so delayed, it was going to be obsolete by the time it would have been released as many of the competing products released new features in the meantime and the market place was changing. When the SideKick was popular among teens, texting with some photosharing were the functions that they used most. But by the time the Kin was released, consumer smartphones like iPhone and Android that did more than text were becoming the desired products.

In the original plan, Verizon wanted to woo these texting teenagers as customers from T-Mobile. So they were willing to offer a cheap data plan. By the time the Kin was launched, the phone itself would consume more data than originally planned (texting phone vs smartphone). Verizon did not feel they needed to honor the original agreement as MS delivered 18 months late. Thus the Kin got the normal smartphone rate. The combination of late, few features, and high data plan would make the Kin not desired by the target market.

Also, the stuff I wrote about e-ink vs. LCD - I know that many would find no difference between the two technologies, in other words, some people can read just fine on an LCD. I'm not one of them. For me, e-ink is far more pleasant to look at. Moreover, I started to go out for reading to breath a bit of fresh air and just be outside - sitting on the terrace of a cafe, in a park, on the beach beneath a shade... and that's where e-ink readers really shine and LCDs, including the iPAD, sucks balls. Indoors, in dim light/no light LCDs have an advantage, but I still find it better to use my Sony Reader with a lamp than reading on a screen with backlight.

profits from extremely punitive lawsuits.

Would you believe that they actually lose money on that shit? Lawyers aren't cheap, especially evil lawyers (even though they make up most of the supply).

I hear Google has plenty of devs in that situation. Tor Norbye (formerly at Sun & Oracle) was talking about switching to Ubuntu now that Java on the Mac was deprecated.

Well it's the basis of the problem : climate change has become the strongest argument there is for a global all-encompassing world government. After all, any policy that hopes to do anything about it seems to need to regulate all energy expenditure world-wide. Now that's a LOT of power.

The only solution to global warming, in other words, is every communist's wet dream. The same is true for dictators, militarists, religious nuts, ... All are obviously supporting global warming, and it is VERY clear for what reason (hint : it's not that they're worried about the environment).

Needless to say, these forces have coopted the discussion. All technological solutions to global warming are instantly thrown out, because if not all support from socialist, communist, dictatorial, muslim and other undesirable governments would evaporate faster than you can say "stone that woman". And don't forget that one of those governments is China. Solutions like darkening the athmosphere, which could enable us to actively regulate the effects of global warming are about as welcome as the subtly-named "malthusian option".

That means that global warming is the number 1 "social justice" cause world-wide. And if you're wondering what's wrong with that, please remember that killing Jews was the number 1 social justice cause worldwide a mere 60 years ago.

While, yes, I agree that there are factions in what's called the "denier" camp : 95% is afraid of what the government will do with the power global warming demands of them, and 5% is actually denying (historical) global warming. As for the dispute on the predictions of the IPCC and effects of global warming : please remember that the IPCC's predictions have all proven false (first IPCC report is 20 years ago, and they made a "95% certain" prediction. We're outside of their 95% range. The same is true for all other IPCC reports. The IPCC's reports have been consistently wrong in their predictions, so exactly what is irrational about refusing to believe their new predictions ? Additionally, to add insult to injury, the IPCC has refused to give a concrete 95% confidence interval for their latest prediction. Coincidence ? Right ... they don't believe their own predictions). In the department of adding insult to injury you can add Al Gore's lifestyle choices.

How about we solve global warming once and for all :
-> use planes to spread dust in the athmosphere
-> use ships to increase H2O in the athmosphere
-> make a huge solar panel and launch it, providing power and dark (preferably mostly over oceans) ...

Policies like that, 95% of the denyer camp will support. IF the earth is warming, these will help.

-> deliver full control over all energy expenditures, from social policy to gasoline taxes to an organization that stood by and did nothing against (or actually caused) all massacres since WWII

That policy WILL NOT improve climate, and will be fought until the dying breath of half of America.

I like the idea of Unity somewhat, but it really isn't much more than an omni-present dock, some shiny effects, and icons. GNOME Shell uses less horizontal space and equal vertical space, scales well for netbooks as well as desktops, has much better notification organization than Unity, is supported upstream much more, it has extensions which allow great control over the system (including this very nice and extremely lightweight dock extension), an Application Menu which lets you quit all windows of an application (and in the future, let you access options that apply to the application as a whole), and so much more! Unity, on the other hand, confuses me. The user interface prefers icons instead of words for telling us what things do, it wastes horizontal space by having that dock, it doesn't have nearly as good workspace management as GNOME Shell, it's slow-ish at the moment, and so on.

GNOME Shell has been steadily improving. You can check the git server right here, which I do every day. And just so you know, the overlay re-design is being worked on and is in a separate branch, which you can find here: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/log/?h=overview-relayout.

http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2008/12/howto-spoof-pakistani-foreign-ministry.html

I now realize that you probably made a BSoD reference but the first thing I thought about when I read your comment was the blue-ish color of cyborgs (especially their arms) in Deus Ex.

Now, as the rule goes "Deus Ex - Every time you mention it, someone will reinstall it" (proof), and I am too busy, I recommend that you install it and being playing immediatelly.

I hope that Amazon drops the Kindle DRM. I don't think it will cost them many sales due to piracy, and it will certainly increase their sales by making the device and ebooks more useful.

Having broken DRM, such as the current Kindle DRM (see unswindle) is almost as good. If I want to lend a friend one of my ebooks, what Amazon thinks are reasonable terms is irrelevant.

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-android-scripting.html

> Google noticed this later and reported on themselves

Just to correct a point that keeps recurring, Google were not proactive in this issue and did not "report themselves".

Following the discovery that Street View cars were fitted with Wifi sniffing equipment, which raised queries from German and UK authorities, on 27 April Google responded with a blog post in which they said Google does not collect or store payload data. This was repeated in releases sent to data protection authorities.

The Data Protection Agency in Hamburg was unconvinced and asked Google to provide a manifest of the exact data that was being collected. Google then discovered that they were collecting payload data and blogged accordingly.

You will notice that at all times Google were reacting to requests.

> Google noticed this later and reported on themselves

Just to correct a point that keeps recurring, Google were not proactive in this issue and did not "report themselves".

Following the discovery that Street View cars were fitted with Wifi sniffing equipment, which raised queries from German and UK authorities, on 27 April Google responded with a blog post in which they said Google does not collect or store payload data. This was repeated in releases sent to data protection authorities.

The Data Protection Agency in Hamburg was unconvinced and asked Google to provide a manifest of the exact data that was being collected. Google then discovered that they were collecting payload data and blogged accordingly.

You will notice that at all times Google were reacting to requests.

The "Malamanteu" article should not exist. Pretty much every new xkcd comic will have idiots adding refrences in wikipedia. There's even a site for it, http://xkcdwikiwatch.blogspot.com/. One of the stupidest examples is the Voynich manuscript, go read the wiki talk page for a dose of the stupidity of these fanbois. Fuck it, here's some for you:

you are incacurrately perceiving thie results of Randal Munroes's resaerch. if you look closely, the detail and art inscription installated at this so-called "joke" is a new theory presented ina nonthreatening and easy to understand way. The mannerisms with which they are presented are trappings without the boring formal archadaemics that many people cn find offputting outside the field. It is in fact the representation of a reasonable and equaly evidenced point of view, expressed by a top NASA former employee. If NASA -- the National Aeronotics and Space Administration are considered less to be deferenced to, then quite frankly all other sources are lesser as well. that is my firm belief and I will in the future present further evidence to try to rationaly persuade you around to this pov

You can write (C and C++) native code on Android.

The Android Scripting Environment adds several scripting languages to Android.

There's a very active debate on wether or not Microsoft at the present time, or throughout its growth after they finished NT has had simply way too many developers, and if its corporate culture hasn't suffered because of the bureaucratic overhead involved in keeping something like 30,000 programmers merely busy, let alone productive, creative, entrepreneurial and all that other awesome stuff you generally need cutting edge development to be. This is the view taken by Mini-Microsoft and others.

Compare also the opinion of John Sculley when he talked about the Mac unit when him and Jobs were still working together -- the whole division, hardware and software was only a hundred people or so, and only maybe a dozen were OS engineers, with another team of equivalent size writing the bundled applications. Apple presently has about 35,000 employees, but its been mentioned in sources that at least 2/3rds of them are in the retail side of the business, and for all of their OS and application development some people put their actual headcount in the mere hundreds.

    Here's a reference. http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/11/should-we-really-bail-out-7320-per-hour.html. I know it's not as good as an official reference, but it is one. I can't find the link I used initially. 73.20 * 2080 = $151.840.

    Of course, that's not reflected in the employee's check. The benefits packages were huge (negotiated by the union), and there were pesky things like union dues. It may not matter to the guy working the line, but it's the figure that the auto manufacturer uses to decide how to operate.

    The thing is, corporations have to work for the best interest of the company and stock holders. That means if the cost of the employee is $150k/yr, and they can get an employee in Canada, Mexico, or China to do the same work for a fraction of that, and there's still a reduction in per-employee cost, then that's what they have to go with. Even the top level positions can be changed by the board of directors, if they aren't working in the best interest of the company. That's why you see so much work sent overseas. If I get 10 widgets per hour from an employee in the US, and that employee costs the company $73.20/hr, then the man hour cost is $7.32 per unit. If I can outsource the same work at $200/mo ($1.15/hr), the man hour cost drops to $0.115 per unit. As long as the cost of shipping and importing does not exceed $6.16, the overall cost per unit drops. Oddly enough, they avoid reflecting that cost in the price to the consumer. The price point of the unit is based on "What is the consumer willing to pay?" If consumers are willing to pay $100/unit, the price will remain $100/unit, which shows an increased profit for the company. The board of directors are happy. The shareholders are happy. The guy who was getting paid $7.32/unit is ... well ... unemployed.

    To adjust for this, the government could increase tariffs on imported items, to adjust for the cost difference to ensure that the jobs remained in the US.

    Relations with China have been touchy at best for years. If the US Gov't raised the tariff substantially, every corporation in America who deals with them would pitch a fit. Well, their lobbyists would "encourage" the decision to keep the tariff at a reasonable rate, to keep the cost per unit low.

"The voting machines will be migrated from VirtuOS and Microsoft Windows CE to GNU/Linux and open sauce[sic] software"
"Software experts from political parties will have access to all voting machine software from April through September"
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1027490/brazil-migrates-voting-machines

http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/07/0029224&threshold=5#25284361

India also has a gov't-built system.
http://techaos.blogspot.com/2004/05/indian-evm-compared-with-diebold.html

gewg_

unfortunately android is free and not open
http://mjfrey.blogspot.com/

looks like running android apps natively was abandoned when it became clear there was too much missing from git. emulation and a virtual machine approach work...

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/05/customize-or-disable-google-update.html

Does this not address your concerns?

From a link in the article that takes you to Jeremiah Grossman's site: http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2010/10/killing-evercookie-google-chrome-wo.html

3) Delete Flash Local Shared Objects (LSO)

Go got the Flash "Website Storage Settings panel"
Click "Delete all sites"
Click "Confirm"

Adobe's "Website Storage Settings Panel" does NOT remove Flash Local Shared Objects from your hard drive; it only removes them from the list that the panel shows you. Look in the following directories after you run it.
/home/$USER/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/
/home/$USER/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/
/home/$USER/.adobe/Flash_Player/AssetCache/

Good thing he's not pushing Judo-Christian mores on you then, right? Indications are he is Buddhist, not Christian or Jewish. But I guess you feel better equating over-bearing, pushy salesmen with your biased preconceptions of a particular religious philosophy than making a comparison with his actual belief system.

yeah..you're not a coroprate guy.

I'm not corporate in the way you want it to mean. But, I work for a large (30,000+) consulting corporation and wear a tie when I'm on client site. I don't have a BlackBerry, but I do use Outlook and Office at work. And when I'm not at work, they're the last things I want. I'm also old enough to want to draw a very clear line between my work and the rest of my life.

It's like you live in a cave.

Or, it's like I don't necessarily agree with all of the whining that everybody needs calendaring and word. Or the implication that anybody who bought a device which can't do this must have clearly chosen wrong. Because the overwhelming argument, as I've seen is "but what about spreadsheets" -- so far you've not done much better.

I'm not even saying that some people don't want this functionality. I'm merely pointing out that there is a huge (and quite likely larger) market of people who aren't interested in PIM and Outlook and Office. It's that vast sea of people who use it for ... well, everything else except business apps.

My son is in 7th grade and there are kids that transfer home work digitally with their device.

I honestly don't know if I should be impressed, or feel sorry for the little bugger as he grows up with a digital leash. Hopefully he will learn to find some balance on that.

New punctuation: "~" at the end of a line to indicate 'Snarky'. http://harns.blogspot.com/

My god, it's like multiple types of consumers can coexist in the same market, and the people who want a highly customizable device can coexist with those who don't.~

They might even accept that it's OK for someone not to use Outlook and Excel and not judge them for it.~

I can almost imagine some wacky form of free market economy where people could buy the device they want and have everyone else would shut up about it.~

You might even conclude that the device which sells more units is more reflective of what people want.~

Why, in my spare time, I could invent some wacky new punctuation to convey the fact that I'm sneering as I type this.~

Seriously, I'm not some Luddite who lives in a cave. I'm aware of these devices, and why people buy them. I'm pointing out that the complaining about not being able to have business apps on their phone might not apply to everybody. Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.

If your 7th grader needs to sync with his Outlook calendar and run spreadsheets, well, that's rather unfortunate. When I was in 7th grade, I rode my skateboard home from school. ;-)

But, hey, you feel free to use whatever tech makes you feel all squishy inside, and I will as well.~

Devastate that economy? I think, again, that's a very hard point to argue.

Actually, I've seen quite a few sources talk about al qaeda's goal of destroying our economy. They know they don't have the means to destroy our army, or our people, or our institutions directly, but they can convince us to waste our own money. And if that forces us to retreat from the areas they want to control, then that's good enough for them. For the most part, they just want us out of the way so they can wage their real war, with their neighbors: secular-muslim states.

One sample: al Qaeda and other jihadists increasingly wage econo-jihad, study finds

Another, from Al Qaeda's grand strategy (summary of a lecture given by Michael Doran, Asst. Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton):

So where does the war stand now, according to al Qaeda? A leading al Qaeda operative has written a book, the title of which translates loosely to “The Management of Chaos.” According to al Qaeda, the current stage of revolution is the stage of “vexation and exhaustion” of the enemy. They have a notion of how to do this to the Americans and to their 'puppets'.

You vex and exhaust the Americans, according to al Qaeda, by making them spend a lot of money. The United States is a materialist society, and if forced to spend too much money it will “cut and run.”

The means to this end is to force the Americans to spread themselves thinly. Al Qaeda wants to strike everywhere, not just spectacular high value attacks. This will cause the Americans to defend a lot of places at high cost.

I know I will like it just fine. I run a ZFS file server that all of my PCs use to store almost everything. All of my data is checksummed, every hour a snapshot is made of every changed file at almost zero cost in time and only the changed data takes up space, I have multiple drives RAID'ed together and because of the checksums the system can actually tell when a bit gets flipped not just when a sector goes bad or a drive crashes.
It took me 15 minutes to set it up. I wrote up the install: http://petertheobald.blogspot.com/2010/09/zfs-powered-file-server-in-5-minutes.html

And every once in a while it ZFS SEND's a copy of the entire filesystem to a drive in my office.

Hard drive crash? Covered by the RAID.
Cosmic ray or bad magnetic spot flips a bit? Covered by the checksums.
Virus takes out files? Covered by the snapshots.
Accidentally delete a file? Covered by the snapshots.
House burns down? I'd be very upset but my data would be ok on the copy in my office.

If you have an applet in a signed jar, the user gets prompted to execute the applet. If the user clicks "Run", the applets gets executed with full permissions. If, on the other hand, the user clicks on "Cancel", the applet gets executed with default applet permissions.

If you have an applet in an unsigned jar, it gets executed with default applet permissions without any user interaction. This is the case of the vulnerability. The default applet permissions are very limited, but they let you call most of the standard classes of Java, including that RMIConnectionImpl class. RMIConnectionImpl had a flaw, where it did privileged deserialization from an untrusted source and that flaw can be leveraged by an applet to elevate it's privileges. (For more details, see my original advisory).

However, Oracle has already fixed that problem, so the GP is just trolling.

http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/oracle-demostrates-great-community-support-and-fixes-eclipse/
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6969236
http://bewarethepenguin.blogspot.com/2010/07/tip-of-hat-to-oracle.html

Most people forget about the basic research performed by most universities, which is absolutely necessary to the academic industry and flows into every aspect of the rest of the world (especially including tech, medical, and military). A good deal of the criticism on the current system comes from a lack of understanding of basic research and its part in academia. While the Wikipedia-style likely has merits for far more than we currently expect (it was equally ill-received when proposed for encyclopedias!), it can't fit into our current paradigm of research universities while retaining the current organization of journals and how they handle submissions (which is another point of contention that needs a serious upgrade of its own).

Therefore, perhaps the part-time lecturer model is preferable as a starting-point. However, due to its for-profit (not to mention anticompetitive and controversial) nature, Phoenix is not an appropriate role model.

Take a look at examples that are already far closer to Wikipedia, like MIT's ESP and Tuft's Experimental College.

http://obamamessiah.blogspot.com/

See some nice examples on the left of creepy cult of personality.

At breaking laws and acting without morality or conscience against the interests of the nation and humanity?

Here: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/

I fought against the BSA when I opposed a proposal for an EU software patent directive. I don't mean to support all aspects of their letter, but I would like to draw some more attention to the fact that the EU "open standards" lobby isn't perfectly credible.

Three months ago I wrote about the open hypocrisy of companies such as IBM, Google, Oracle and Red Hat. Since I wrote that blog post, lots of new things have happened and become known: the European Commission felt forced to launch two parallel antitrust investigations, one of which relates to IBM's refusal to provide interoperability; Oracle sued Google over seven Java patents; later Google and Oracle accused each other of hypocrisy; now Oracle has thrown out the founders of LibreOffice from its OpenOffice mailing list; and Red Hat doesn't appear to comply with LSB 4.0. So much for "open standards" when those companies -- the primary backers of the EU open standards lobby -- are concerned...

What's worse is that the proponents of "open standards" don't tell the truth as far as the compatibility of FOSS licenses with patent licenses is concerned. Such licenses as the Apache license, BSD licenses or the EUPL (European Union Public License) don't contain any language that could be understood to prevent a software publisher/distributor/user from doing a license deal with a patent holder. The only family of licenses where that scenario is addressed is the GPL. GPLv3 isn't relevant, and GPLv2 contains some language that's clearly unable to prevent such arrangements as the Novell-Microsoft partnership (announced four years ago and still not challenged formally by anyone). Even the early drafts of GPLv3 wouldn't have blocked the Novell-Microsoft kind of patent deal, as Richard Stallman admitted at the time. Also, there are plenty of examples of companies distributing GPLv2-based software and paying patent royalties, including Red Hat, TomTom, HTC, LG, Samsung...

So even though one may very well believe (and I'm known for that position) that software should preferably not be patentable, it's disingenous to claim that FOSS licenses prohibit inbound patent licensing. It happens all the time, and there's increasing awareness for that fact in the EU, which makes those who spread lies or grossly misleading statements look pretty bad.

One of the organizations lobbying alongside the likes of IBM for open standards, the FFII, has a board member who admitted six months ago that they received significant funding to do their work against OOXML and that he was initially skeptical but, apparently, money overcame his doubts. The FFII of 2010 and recent years isn't anymore the kind of pan-European network that fought against software patents until 2005. It's only a very small group of activists, and some of them appear to act as corporate stooges now.

I fought against the BSA when I opposed a proposal for an EU software patent directive. I don't mean to support all aspects of their letter, but I would like to draw some more attention to the fact that the EU "open standards" lobby isn't perfectly credible.

Three months ago I wrote about the open hypocrisy of companies such as IBM, Google, Oracle and Red Hat. Since I wrote that blog post, lots of new things have happened and become known: the European Commission felt forced to launch two parallel antitrust investigations, one of which relates to IBM's refusal to provide interoperability; Oracle sued Google over seven Java patents; later Google and Oracle accused each other of hypocrisy; now Oracle has thrown out the founders of LibreOffice from its OpenOffice mailing list; and Red Hat doesn't appear to comply with LSB 4.0. So much for "open standards" when those companies -- the primary backers of the EU open standards lobby -- are concerned...

What's worse is that the proponents of "open standards" don't tell the truth as far as the compatibility of FOSS licenses with patent licenses is concerned. Such licenses as the Apache license, BSD licenses or the EUPL (European Union Public License) don't contain any language that could be understood to prevent a software publisher/distributor/user from doing a license deal with a patent holder. The only family of licenses where that scenario is addressed is the GPL. GPLv3 isn't relevant, and GPLv2 contains some language that's clearly unable to prevent such arrangements as the Novell-Microsoft partnership (announced four years ago and still not challenged formally by anyone). Even the early drafts of GPLv3 wouldn't have blocked the Novell-Microsoft kind of patent deal, as Richard Stallman admitted at the time. Also, there are plenty of examples of companies distributing GPLv2-based software and paying patent royalties, including Red Hat, TomTom, HTC, LG, Samsung...

So even though one may very well believe (and I'm known for that position) that software should preferably not be patentable, it's disingenous to claim that FOSS licenses prohibit inbound patent licensing. It happens all the time, and there's increasing awareness for that fact in the EU, which makes those who spread lies or grossly misleading statements look pretty bad.

One of the organizations lobbying alongside the likes of IBM for open standards, the FFII, has a board member who admitted six months ago that they received significant funding to do their work against OOXML and that he was initially skeptical but, apparently, money overcame his doubts. The FFII of 2010 and recent years isn't anymore the kind of pan-European network that fought against software patents until 2005. It's only a very small group of activists, and some of them appear to act as corporate stooges now.

Quoting myself

At some point some open source projects developers may go in a direction that the distribution vendors and end uses may disagree with. It is the licensing which allows a fork of the project to develop that sets the open source development model apart from the pure proprietary development model. Apache, X.org and even the current version of the GNU GCC compiler toolset have been all derived from an outside fork of an existing open source project. No vendor or open source software developer can block development for any substantial period of time without the risk of the development being taken over by a descendant of the same project -- it's called evolution.

Every time the leading members/developers of each of those original projects complained bitterly about the interlopers.

The longer the original team remains entrenched in their design/implementation choices, the less the original team control has over the successor project and the less original product's market share of total users.

This will remain true for all freely licensed source code that Oracle has purchased or inherited. Even for the forks of the GPL licensed Java.

In the end freely licensed source code can have no dictators, only obsoleted dickhead.

(Score:6, Insightful)

At some point some open source projects developers may go in a direction that the distribution vendors and end uses may disagree with. It is the licensing which allows a fork of the project to develop that sets the open source development model apart from the pure proprietary development model. Apache, X.org and even the current version of the GNU GCC compiler toolset have been all derived from an outside fork of an existing open source project. No vendor or open source software developer can block development for any substantial period of time without the risk of the development being taken over by a descendant of the same project -- it's called evolution.

Every time the leading members/developers of each of those original projects complained bitterly about the interlopers.

The longer the original team remains entrenched in their design/implementation choices, the less the original team control has over the successor project and the less original product's market share of total users.

This will remain true for all freely licensed source code that Oracle has purchased or inherited. Even for the forks of the GPL licensed Java.

In the end freely licensed source code can have no dictators, only obsoleted dickhead.

You have to explicitly request excommunication in order to be dropped from the church rolls, and that's really only the beginning of the process, as they may not let you go without a fight.

By legal precedent in the United States (GUINN V. THE CHURCH OF CHRIST OF COLLINSVILLE), one can submit a written letter of resignation to a religious organization, and anything that organization does to treat you like a member after they receive that letter is tortable. Perhaps more lawyers should get involved in cases where churches fail to properly act on member resignations.