Slashdot Mirror
Coursey on Palladium
lrose writes "Check out this story over at ZDNet -- Microsoft is developing a secure operating system to be combined with hardware doing public key cryptography. The DRM aspect reminds me of something I read about an imaginary day in the not-too-distant future, where you can no longer install Linux on your own box because you don't have the necessary rights." Coursey's column is quite interesting, bringing a lot more of the backstory behind Palladium into public view. While geeks have been following and worrying about the TCPA, Microsoft has been working to spin the story with assorted columnists and journalists, so that when it broke it would be in the context that Steven Levy bought into hook, line and sinker: a scheme to protect you rather than one to prevent you from using your computer in unapproved ways.
Holy shit! That got modded down in TWO SECONDS. I post, click the (#xxxxxx) link, and it's already at -1.
michael's really wanking hard over his keyboard today, eh?
The whole Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one-fifth the number that Greece translates. In the 1,000 years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year.
Qui me amat, amet et canem meum.
n/m
and how about those goddamned niggers?
I mean, if you want to talk about just plain fucking stupid people, it's hard not to mention the niggers.
There is a nasty Cross Site Scripting vuln in Slashcode. This was used a day or so ago on slashdot.org and resulted in most of the site being taken down for an hour or so. The maintainers of slashcode have patched the problem in CVS but have not even mentioned it anywhere that I can find. This leaves all sites using slash vulnerable to this exploit.
An example exploit (incomplete) is as follows:
<p > onMouseOver..insert javascript here...>
I am dissapointed that the slachcode maintainers have silently fixed this on slashdot.org yet made no mention of the problem elsewhere so that other sites can patch themselves. No wonder there are so many "trolls" on slashdot.org...ah well.
If you run a site using slashcode, get the latest CVS.
That is all. Move along.
Godwin's Law states that as any discussion gets longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Essentially, any time you get a bunch of people together, talking about any subject, chances are that the conversation will wander to the point that someone compares something to Nazis. This happens for two reasons:
1) The Nazis made such a massive impact on the 20th century that you'll end up seeing some comparison eventually.
2) If you get pissed off, you generally go fishing for the worst insult that you can get, and calling someone a Nazi generally does it.
I'd expand this law to include "fascist" as well. People generally mean Nazi when they say fascist, and including that would probably make the law more closely match most discussions.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
...it was a tounge in cheek joke about USENET flames of its day. It was never considered by its creator to be an actual, accurate commentary on internet speech, much less some deeply wise insight into the human psyche, and certainly not as a new "rule" of debate.
Indeed.
And the literal interpretation of Godwin's law has been used heavily by anti-freedom posters (including neo-fascists) to shut down debate. They do this when someone:
points out how their proposal is similar to one of the programs of the NAZI party, or
tries to show how the NAZIs already took that nice-sounding idea and ran it into the ground.
So I now formulate:
Rod's Law of Internet Debate: "Anyone citing Godwin's Law against an opponent in a serious political debate has admitted he is an authoritarian and has lost the argument."
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way