Christ jd, see that "return" key on your keyboard? Hit it every now and again, OK? Thanks! : )
NASA bosses are competing with each other, which is 99% of the problem
Spot on. An excellent insight.
Artificially forcing society to have problems, as opposed to simply changing society to delight in their solving, creates yet more overhead and also engenders mistrust and resentment within society.
This is self-contradictory. Are the problems real or not? I agree with your sentiment in general but don't understand this part. Also - we're talking about NASA, not society at large. NASA may well be a microcosm of the greater world but I don't think every little thing maps with the directness you imply.
Got an example, maybe?
We OFTEN see this in the private sector. With or without competition.
We do indeed see these petty fiefdoms often, just not at the same scale. Look, people are idiots. Every insecure manager ever wants to make a little fiefdom and rule it just for himself. It is, unfortunately, human nature.
However, government takes it to a whole new level. A normal company might limp along with, say, 10% or 20% wastage due to stupid office politics/fiefdoms/CYA/BS. I hate it, I LOATHE it, but it's normal. In government or in unaccountable "undriven" monopolies it can be 90%+. It can be hard to figure out what a government department does other than endlessly play these stupid, wasteful games with itself.
Sometimes, by the way, that is a good thing. The less competent certain government departments are, the better, IMO. It's still a stupid waste of money but at least the monetary waste is the only damage they can inflict.
Anyway, I agree with the general tone of your comment.
Yeah, I stupidly came across sounding like I disapproved of it. Couldn't be further from the truth, I am exactly the kind of immature bastard who will put 6x as much work into something like this just to cackle manically when some poor fool walks into the trap.
For example...
I may or may not know a company who were/are creating a "netbank" service, and part of that was publishing near-realtime currency exchange rate data, for which they paid dearly btw. The service hadn't even left beta (still hasn't) when lo and behold, an obviously automated visitor started appearing with extreme regularity on the logs.
I can't remember the exact algorithm but it was something like: if someone from the same IP, who has visited more than 10 times in the last 5 hours, with a standard deviation of less than 1 minute in the interval between visits.. they get served this "special" page.
On that special page, the loop that printed out all the currency rates had a special addition, which looked (from memory) something like this:
if rand(1000) 2
rate *= (1 + (rand(100) - 50).to_f / 100) end
ie. once every thousand values, you get a rate that's adjusted by a random value between +/- 50%.
I hope that the guy (or his clients) didn't make any currency trades based upon the info he got from that page. Actually, I lie, I hope he did;)
Now I think about it, I'm gonna ask how many hits that "special" page gets these days. Heh.
I feel your pain about the bosses, I've had some bad ones myself. But these guys were awesome - they considered that kind of scraping as just another espionage attempt which should be handled with subtlety and maximum "interference" powers. I love that kind of attitude.
Any company with a website that contains "regularly updated data that might be interesting for competitors" has probably already got some kind of anti-scraping system in place. This guy's boss thinks he's being clever and original - of course he's not, any company with a site of any value and popularity has already seen this a million times.
What they return basically depends on the mentality of those who work there. The "by the book" professional types will just blackhole the IP or return a "too many visits from this IP" page.
Companies with a more BOFH type guy in charge might very well start "playing" with the data. Instead of the "too many visits" page you might find yourself getting a page with some of the data changed around randomly. Believe me, there are *many* people around who think it is just the height of comedy to fuck with people who are basically stealing their stuff anyway.
They will turn it into a game - and, when the erroneous data turns up on the thieving web site (if that's what this guy's company is running), a few screenshots of that site with the modified data suddenly becomes pretty good evidence in a court, if they're of the "legal remedy" persuasion.
Scraping data is a last resort, not the first thing you try. Forget the ethics - the fact he's working for a company willing to be that insanely cheap and stupid in the first place should be a signal to run far, far away in itself.
To my admittedly outsider's eye, NASA looks and acts exactly like your classic dysfunctional monopoly bureaucracy. These things are common and seem unavoidable - everything that I've read about the Ares debacle is right in line with a sclerotic, mismanaged, change-averse (and risk-averse.. just not the right type of risk) fiefdom-addled government clusterfuck we see time and time again. Hell, not just government - occasionally we see this in the private sector too, when a trenchant monopoly manages to establish itself somewhere and then proceeds to lose sight of everything that got it there in the first place and rots from within. Microsoft of 5 years ago, by all accounts, got pretty close to that, but there are many others, especially in defense.
What kills this is competition, genuine competition, that forces the organisation to adapt or perish. Nothing other than imminent risk of complete death will force such organisations to subject themselves to the kind of creative destruction needed to re-invent themselves.
I personally believe that NASA in its present form is lost, but forms can change. The key element is the competition now arising from other countries' space agencies. NASA no longer has a monopoly; it will not take long before the results from other agencies - done better, faster, cheaper - will force radical change at NASA.
It's not the 1960s again yet, but when China and India announce dates for their moon landings, you can bet the clock will start spinning backwards within days.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. I love America, but it desperately needs competition. The same could go for NASA. Well, it'll get it soon enough.
Funny how NASA - and America in general - needs foreigners to keep itself in line. Back in the day it was Von Braun. Now it's Hu Jintao who will provide the electric shock necessary to revive this intransigent patient.
America isn't a country, it's a team. It needs to fight, it needs to compete, it needs constant challenge. If there's no "enemy", it gets lazy and tears itself apart. Just like every other empire in history. I use that word without any perjorative intention, by the way - there is simply no other way to describe a country with so many overseas military bases. Of course America is an empire, and there's nothing wrong with that.
But god, it needs competition. The good news is - competition is on the way. In space, and everywhere else, America now faces its first real competition in generations.
I for one am on the edge of my seat, waiting for the games to begin, and looking forward to what the "real america" - the one that competes, and wins - can come up with. USA!
Oh come on. Australia is bad but it's not THAT bad.
I have iinet ADSL2 here, 65G/month. Including phone and everything it's under $100/month. That's for service hovering around 20Mb/s.
It's a far cry from the wonderful, beautiful, heavenly unlimited 100Mbit full duplex I had in Tokyo but carrying on like we are all labouring under such ridiculously low limits is disingenuous.
And I know for a fact that iinet services Canberra. So what's the problem, apart from extreme penny-pinching?
The problem with using your ISP as an "untrusted comms link" is that that link has to terminate somewhere. If that somewhere is public, it's slow and untrusted anyway. If it's private, your name is on it.
I suspect the prime motivation is just to spread the footprint around a bit and avoid obvious logging hubs like ISP nameservers. As far as anyone knows, Australian ISPs/peer exchanges are not bulk logging http headers (URLs, referrers, etc). But NS is suspect. I do not know for sure one way or the other.
soon we end up with people fearful of what they say on the phone and in emails
If you were friends or colleagues with anyone who has ever worked in the intelligence community, you would know that there are plenty of people who already act likes this. I was first cut off with a curt "not over the phone" talking to a friend who was ex-DSD (Aust. intel) in the mid nineties. To say that things have deterioated somewhat since then would be an understatement.
The most recent trend with my ex-intel friends, by the way, is to use private nameservers. I have absolutely no evidence as to why that might be necessary. I am just sayin', that's what they're doing now.
If Eurozone countries were willing to go to war over making $100 more on oil they could drill for rather than make themselves, they'd already be doing it, since they could make that right now. Obviously, they are not.
And please, yank, don't you dare criticise anyone else's pot. Marijuana in the USA is the worst in the world bar none. Plus, it's illegal!
When the oil gets to $200, 300, 500 - and priced in euros by then - there will be skirmishes.
Maybe so, but not between Euro nations like Britain and Norway. They have far more to lose from sanctions and possibly military reciprocity than they could ever gain from a bit of oil, not matter how much it was worth. You're talking like oil is the key to all world riches - hardly. Nice to have but everywhere else seems to get along OK without it.
And as another reply mentioned, there are long-term ceilings on oil price above, say, $200 or so in today's dollars. It could spike amove there short to medium term, but at that level production of alternatives would be extremely profitable, no war needed. Hell, you can make gas from coal liquifecation. Guess which country has 250 billion tonnes of coal? Hint: you probably live in it.
And let's not forget that resourceless islands like Japan have had the shit scared out of them by the latest oil price bubble. They are *pouring* money into research to get themselves off the oil teat. And you know, I heard they might make a car or two down there...
Although your silly comments about the stoned nature of Norwegian troops makes me wonder if I'm just feeding some weird kind of troll.
It's said the next Euro-war will be between Britain and Norway, over the North Sea oil.
What?! Who the hell says that?
Firstly, prosperous modern democracies with large middle classes and a lot to lose do not go to war. There has never been a single case. It is just not going to happen.
Secondly, there could be no victory. If Norway attacked Britain, the rest of Europe would stand by and watch Norway reap its well-deserved stomping from the vastly superior British armed forces. If Britain attacked Norway, the rest of the EU would declare war on them. Either way would bring utter disaster for the aggresor.
If you'd said Russia v. Norway, that would be at least a little more within the bounds of extreme probability, though still highly unlikely. The world will have to get a lot crazier before Russia attacking mainstream Europe over relatively minor resources would be anything other than a suicide mission. Russia may be a little aggresive but they're not insane.
You obviously don't have a clue how these companies behave. DRM -> piracy -> "See? We were right! MORE DRM!!!". I never said it's the way it should be, but it's reality. Deal with it.
Who cares? They can add as much DRM as they want. They can DRM themselves into fucking orbit for all I care, I ain't buying it.
I buy games that 1. are good and 2. are not too crazy with the restrictions. I suspect I am very far from alone - in fact from the general tone here I think I'm in the majority. Companies ignore us, then, at their peril.
writting software to run on windows is as easy as it gets
Here, you are missing that no-one is talking about writing software to run on windows.
If you want to integrate with non-windows machines just use webservies which are fully documented by MS and various other sources since SOAP and http are both standard protocols.
Here, you are missing that the problem is not a Windows developer integrating with other platforms, but third party developers integrating with Microsoft. In other words, yes, it is very easy to access an email server on linux from your Windows program. It is rather less easy to talk to an Exchange server successfully from Linux.
I refuse to pay attention to any Anti-trust investigations into MS unless Apple is put to the same scrutiny.
Here, you are missing the legal concept and reality of the "monopoly". Microsoft is a monopoly, Apple isn't, end of story.
Have to admit, though, I would like to see more open behaviour of Apple. They've recovered now, they don't need special treatment any more. We gave them a free pass for a while, but I think the day is coming when that pass will be revoked, if it hasn't already.
I would personally like to see OSX available for commodity hardware, with a strict HCL perhaps. I think it will happen. Either Apple does it or 3rd parties will (witness the recent USB solution) - I think it's inevitable.
From the marketing "blog" linked in the summary (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cgi-bin/ViewBlogEntry.pl?id=14)
writing and maintaining developer documentation is an important part of any software development project [...] Another reason for documentation is compliance management [...] our collaborative software development project lifecycle management product Code Roller supports compliance management [...]
"I disagree with your business model, but rather than just do without your product and deprive you of a sale, I'd rather stea... err, share your product at no cost to myself"
Same result. The producer doesn't get the money. If the end user ends up satisfying himself via other means, what does it matter?
And it's not just a slight disagreement with some abstract business model, it's a matter of principle and practicality.
I have bought plenty of games, I like few things in life better than shooting up stuff in a good looking game. I took the day off work when half-life 2 was released, for example, in order to spend a wonderful, WONDERFUL long weekend playing it through. That cost me $129, by the way, I bought some super pack and I'm in Australia where everything is overpriced. I don't begrudge that money AT ALL. Seriously, is $50 or $100 or even $150 all that much these days?
By the way I bought a PS2 for the sole reason of playing MGS2. So that should give you some indication that I don't mind paying to have fun, and oh boy I had fun. My time is valuable, both to me and as a professional, and I don't mind spending money to enjoy myself. For fuck's sake I spent more than $100 last night just going out.
But when I buy a game, I have the expectation that I will be able to play that game, without hassle, indefinitely. I do not want other software installed, I do not want some intrusive crap screwing up an already temperamental Windows install (which I use solely for gaming). I do not want that and I will not pay money for it.
I have no problem whatsoever with anti-piracy techniques that I consider reasonable. Quake's system, of checking the key online but only for multiplayer, was probably my favourite but I didn't really mind Steam doing the same. That is reasonable. I understand they have to make money, hell I *want* them to make a lot of money so they can make more games for me to play!
But constantly running spyware? Interfering with Virtual Disk software? 3 installs maximum?
Fuck off with that fucking shit. In fact, as a generally good customer it makes me so angry I *want* to go torrent that crap.
But I don't even like downloading cracked software. It's always just some initial release, heaps of bugs, and never patched later. I don't want to spend my nights fighting some buggy cracked software. But no fucking way do I want to be ringing some god damn call centre one day begging to be allowed to install MY software that I BOUGHT.
I'm glad I mentioned Steam because in my mind that is the best balance yet between consumers and producer's rights. Sure some people don't like it, but I think it's great. And what's best about it is it offers some carrots, not just a stick.
The most wonderful thing about Steam is that it allows you to re-download your games without the CD/DVD! Once I was sitting in a rented apartment late at night in Tokyo with a Macbook Pro. I had jetlag, I was bored, had nothing to do. I thought, "I could really enjoy drinking some beer and playing HL2 about now!". I had a Windows disk (I always carry one, despite myself), installed Steam, told it to download all my games, went and bought the beer and 1 hour later I was playing. I think I became the biggest fan of Steam ever that night. Finally, a copy protection system that offers something back!!
This Securom shit is all stick and no carrot. And just installing it is being hit with the stick. Fuck that shit.
I don't really feel the need to go and download a cracked copy of Crysis Warhead, but if I did, I would have no moral qualms about it AT ALL.
You have a good point. T. Square was a pretty shameful episode and they've done an astoundingly good job of covering it up.
Or have they? I have 3 points of my own.
1. Most of the Chinese I have known knew all about Tiananmen Square. Does that mean they all do? Nope, the ones I knew are a pretty self-selecting mob, in that they were predisposed to be making friends with a foreign devil in the first place.
My point is, though, that anyone who wants to know, can find out. Think about it. What is the absolutely minimum information necessary to have a good understanding of what happened there? The wikipedia article, maybe? A PDF of that is 100K or so.
China's internet censorship is legendary, but even they can't possibly even think about stopping a determined person from somehow getting a 100K PDF file into China and emailing it around a bit. There are plenty of websites who provide such information and plenty of people willing to help. The censorship only stops the casual-interest type. This is pretty well known.
So why don't they all know? Same reason 99 out of 100 Americans (my guess) wouldn't know what the Kent State Massacre was. They don't want to know. They're embarrassed and ashamed of a pretty dark moment in their country's history. They are interested in getting on with their lives, not digging up painful dirt on their own country.
Is that pure censorship, or something more complex? You tell me.
2. TS was 20 years ago, and twenty years is a long time in the incredibly rapidly-changing world that is modern China. Again, I'm guessing, but I don't think they could get away with that today - or would even think about it. The fact is the capitalist train is running very nicely on track now. Everyone's happier, and the govt is a lot less nervous. And the people are more empowered, and know it, and the government knows it - why would they do something like that now?
I just don't see it happening, just like I don't see another Kent State happening. Times have changed.
3. With the proliferation of digital media technology, including capture devices, it would be a hell of a lot harder to disguise something like that. Say the rocket blows up a mile in the air. How many thousand people witness that? They can't shut ALL of them up, and the "internet rumour factory" there dwarfs that in western countries, perhaps understandably.
What would they do? Just shut off the video? Then everyone would know something went wrong. Try to fake it with CG? What.. the whole thing!? Including pictures in space, with people.. the spacewalk..?
I don't think that's possible. Other countries would hint that they'd seen an explosion. Hell, amateurs with telescopes would report they couldn't find the purported orbital unit. They couldn't possibly get away with it, and the whole thing would backfire a million times worse than the Olympics thing.
I just can't see them even attempting to do something like that, they're not crazy.
So for all those reasons.. I don't think it's the same kind of situation. I can't give any credibility to the notion that the Chinese govt would even attempt to fake an entire space mission. Not in this day and age. They're not stupid, in fact anything but.
Exactly. Any major news company does this kind of thing if there's a big event coming that they know about; it's just part of being prepared.
You can just imagine how it went down - ask an intern to draft a victorious announcement. Jazz it up with some dialogue, use your imagination, etc. Sure, posting it ahead of time was pretty dumb, but hardly the huge conspiracy of deception that the summary makes it out to be - how exactly could you fake a successful rocket launch, anyway? Or more so - hide an explosive failure?
Ridiculous. It's much ado about nothing. I bet this happens every day.
And as for the "fake fireworks", I have another revelation for everyone - did you see that man who ran in the air all around the stadium? See him? Well, prepare to have your mind blown. Are you ready? Sure you're really ready? OK, get this:
And you're part of the problem. By frequenting all those websites, you're proving you don't mind all the duplicates.
You have two options if you actually want your problem solved:
1. Stop visiting offending sites. If enough people stop visiting Slashdot because the content is stale the editors/stakeholders will react soon enough.
2. Choose one site and stick with it.
Personally I just generally rely on Slashdot for tech news. If it's important, it'll probably be on here. If it's not important, I don't care anyway. That rule's held up pretty well for a while.
Er, I was responding to prockcore's comment, not yours!
Unless of course you have just inadvertently outed yourself as also being behind the sockpuppet prockcore, in which case your posts turn into an ironic "hoist by your own petard" take on the reliability of going by apparent names as the deciding factor of what is trustworthy information online.
So what you're saying is you're unable to separate the message from the messenger?
It doesn't matter a damn if IBM owns and operates Groklaw if the information on it is correct and stands up to scrutiny. To date, it has. So what's the problem?
In my opinion, the case of Groklaw is a great example of the public benefit of anonymous speech. If she had outed herself she might have been sued, pulled into court, lost her job, even physically harrassed. But by keeping her anonymity - and her integrity - she's been able to make a pretty big impact in the case, at least to us nerds who care about such things. She did exactly the right thing.
Names are meaningless. And even if you had it, what good what that do? What are you going to do, drive to that address, demand to see her bank statement to ensure there's no payments from IBM?
Where the information comes from is irrelevant. The quality of the information is the only thing that matters. Groklaw has stood the test of time, in my opinion, so you're doing yourself a disservice by downrating it on that basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Christ jd, see that "return" key on your keyboard? Hit it every now and again, OK? Thanks! : )
NASA bosses are competing with each other, which is 99% of the problem
Spot on. An excellent insight.
Artificially forcing society to have problems, as opposed to simply changing society to delight in their solving, creates yet more overhead and also engenders mistrust and resentment within society.
This is self-contradictory. Are the problems real or not? I agree with your sentiment in general but don't understand this part. Also - we're talking about NASA, not society at large. NASA may well be a microcosm of the greater world but I don't think every little thing maps with the directness you imply.
Got an example, maybe?
We OFTEN see this in the private sector. With or without competition.
We do indeed see these petty fiefdoms often, just not at the same scale. Look, people are idiots. Every insecure manager ever wants to make a little fiefdom and rule it just for himself. It is, unfortunately, human nature.
However, government takes it to a whole new level. A normal company might limp along with, say, 10% or 20% wastage due to stupid office politics/fiefdoms/CYA/BS. I hate it, I LOATHE it, but it's normal. In government or in unaccountable "undriven" monopolies it can be 90%+. It can be hard to figure out what a government department does other than endlessly play these stupid, wasteful games with itself.
Sometimes, by the way, that is a good thing. The less competent certain government departments are, the better, IMO. It's still a stupid waste of money but at least the monetary waste is the only damage they can inflict.
Anyway, I agree with the general tone of your comment.
* all figures pulled straight out of my ass
Yeah, I stupidly came across sounding like I disapproved of it. Couldn't be further from the truth, I am exactly the kind of immature bastard who will put 6x as much work into something like this just to cackle manically when some poor fool walks into the trap.
For example ...
I may or may not know a company who were/are creating a "netbank" service, and part of that was publishing near-realtime currency exchange rate data, for which they paid dearly btw. The service hadn't even left beta (still hasn't) when lo and behold, an obviously automated visitor started appearing with extreme regularity on the logs.
I can't remember the exact algorithm but it was something like: if someone from the same IP, who has visited more than 10 times in the last 5 hours, with a standard deviation of less than 1 minute in the interval between visits .. they get served this "special" page.
On that special page, the loop that printed out all the currency rates had a special addition, which looked (from memory) something like this:
if rand(1000) 2
rate *= (1 + (rand(100) - 50).to_f / 100)
end
ie. once every thousand values, you get a rate that's adjusted by a random value between +/- 50%.
I hope that the guy (or his clients) didn't make any currency trades based upon the info he got from that page. Actually, I lie, I hope he did ;)
Now I think about it, I'm gonna ask how many hits that "special" page gets these days. Heh.
I feel your pain about the bosses, I've had some bad ones myself. But these guys were awesome - they considered that kind of scraping as just another espionage attempt which should be handled with subtlety and maximum "interference" powers. I love that kind of attitude.
Troll?! What part of that comment constitutes any kind of troll?
Please save your mod points for my real trolls! You won't have to wait long, I've just opened my 4th Asahi Super Dry ...
Did I say I didn't approve?
I am definitely in the "bastards who find actual physical pleasure in fucking with my enemies" camp ; )
Definitely possible!
Any company with a website that contains "regularly updated data that might be interesting for competitors" has probably already got some kind of anti-scraping system in place. This guy's boss thinks he's being clever and original - of course he's not, any company with a site of any value and popularity has already seen this a million times.
What they return basically depends on the mentality of those who work there. The "by the book" professional types will just blackhole the IP or return a "too many visits from this IP" page.
Companies with a more BOFH type guy in charge might very well start "playing" with the data. Instead of the "too many visits" page you might find yourself getting a page with some of the data changed around randomly. Believe me, there are *many* people around who think it is just the height of comedy to fuck with people who are basically stealing their stuff anyway.
They will turn it into a game - and, when the erroneous data turns up on the thieving web site (if that's what this guy's company is running), a few screenshots of that site with the modified data suddenly becomes pretty good evidence in a court, if they're of the "legal remedy" persuasion.
Scraping data is a last resort, not the first thing you try. Forget the ethics - the fact he's working for a company willing to be that insanely cheap and stupid in the first place should be a signal to run far, far away in itself.
To my admittedly outsider's eye, NASA looks and acts exactly like your classic dysfunctional monopoly bureaucracy. These things are common and seem unavoidable - everything that I've read about the Ares debacle is right in line with a sclerotic, mismanaged, change-averse (and risk-averse .. just not the right type of risk) fiefdom-addled government clusterfuck we see time and time again. Hell, not just government - occasionally we see this in the private sector too, when a trenchant monopoly manages to establish itself somewhere and then proceeds to lose sight of everything that got it there in the first place and rots from within. Microsoft of 5 years ago, by all accounts, got pretty close to that, but there are many others, especially in defense.
What kills this is competition, genuine competition, that forces the organisation to adapt or perish. Nothing other than imminent risk of complete death will force such organisations to subject themselves to the kind of creative destruction needed to re-invent themselves.
I personally believe that NASA in its present form is lost, but forms can change. The key element is the competition now arising from other countries' space agencies. NASA no longer has a monopoly; it will not take long before the results from other agencies - done better, faster, cheaper - will force radical change at NASA.
It's not the 1960s again yet, but when China and India announce dates for their moon landings, you can bet the clock will start spinning backwards within days.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. I love America, but it desperately needs competition. The same could go for NASA. Well, it'll get it soon enough.
Funny how NASA - and America in general - needs foreigners to keep itself in line. Back in the day it was Von Braun. Now it's Hu Jintao who will provide the electric shock necessary to revive this intransigent patient.
America isn't a country, it's a team. It needs to fight, it needs to compete, it needs constant challenge. If there's no "enemy", it gets lazy and tears itself apart. Just like every other empire in history. I use that word without any perjorative intention, by the way - there is simply no other way to describe a country with so many overseas military bases. Of course America is an empire, and there's nothing wrong with that.
But god, it needs competition. The good news is - competition is on the way. In space, and everywhere else, America now faces its first real competition in generations.
I for one am on the edge of my seat, waiting for the games to begin, and looking forward to what the "real america" - the one that competes, and wins - can come up with. USA!
Oh come on. Australia is bad but it's not THAT bad.
I have iinet ADSL2 here, 65G/month. Including phone and everything it's under $100/month. That's for service hovering around 20Mb/s.
It's a far cry from the wonderful, beautiful, heavenly unlimited 100Mbit full duplex I had in Tokyo but carrying on like we are all labouring under such ridiculously low limits is disingenuous.
And I know for a fact that iinet services Canberra. So what's the problem, apart from extreme penny-pinching?
I even had to mandate using DateTime.UtcNow in the code all the time.
Which is, of course, what you should have been doing all along.
And I hate those stupid blog stories anyway.
Here's a real article with actual information:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20081022a1.html
The problem with using your ISP as an "untrusted comms link" is that that link has to terminate somewhere. If that somewhere is public, it's slow and untrusted anyway. If it's private, your name is on it.
I suspect the prime motivation is just to spread the footprint around a bit and avoid obvious logging hubs like ISP nameservers. As far as anyone knows, Australian ISPs/peer exchanges are not bulk logging http headers (URLs, referrers, etc). But NS is suspect. I do not know for sure one way or the other.
At least the Chinese [...] call a spade a spade.
No they don't, they call it a 'tieqiao'.
(damn it slashdot .. how about supporting UTF8 one of these years?)
soon we end up with people fearful of what they say on the phone and in emails
If you were friends or colleagues with anyone who has ever worked in the intelligence community, you would know that there are plenty of people who already act likes this. I was first cut off with a curt "not over the phone" talking to a friend who was ex-DSD (Aust. intel) in the mid nineties. To say that things have deterioated somewhat since then would be an understatement.
The most recent trend with my ex-intel friends, by the way, is to use private nameservers. I have absolutely no evidence as to why that might be necessary. I am just sayin', that's what they're doing now.
If Eurozone countries were willing to go to war over making $100 more on oil they could drill for rather than make themselves, they'd already be doing it, since they could make that right now. Obviously, they are not.
And please, yank, don't you dare criticise anyone else's pot. Marijuana in the USA is the worst in the world bar none. Plus, it's illegal!
When the oil gets to $200, 300, 500 - and priced in euros by then - there will be skirmishes.
Maybe so, but not between Euro nations like Britain and Norway. They have far more to lose from sanctions and possibly military reciprocity than they could ever gain from a bit of oil, not matter how much it was worth. You're talking like oil is the key to all world riches - hardly. Nice to have but everywhere else seems to get along OK without it.
And as another reply mentioned, there are long-term ceilings on oil price above, say, $200 or so in today's dollars. It could spike amove there short to medium term, but at that level production of alternatives would be extremely profitable, no war needed. Hell, you can make gas from coal liquifecation. Guess which country has 250 billion tonnes of coal? Hint: you probably live in it.
And let's not forget that resourceless islands like Japan have had the shit scared out of them by the latest oil price bubble. They are *pouring* money into research to get themselves off the oil teat. And you know, I heard they might make a car or two down there...
Although your silly comments about the stoned nature of Norwegian troops makes me wonder if I'm just feeding some weird kind of troll.
It's said the next Euro-war will be between Britain and Norway, over the North Sea oil.
What?! Who the hell says that?
Firstly, prosperous modern democracies with large middle classes and a lot to lose do not go to war. There has never been a single case. It is just not going to happen.
Secondly, there could be no victory. If Norway attacked Britain, the rest of Europe would stand by and watch Norway reap its well-deserved stomping from the vastly superior British armed forces. If Britain attacked Norway, the rest of the EU would declare war on them. Either way would bring utter disaster for the aggresor.
If you'd said Russia v. Norway, that would be at least a little more within the bounds of extreme probability, though still highly unlikely. The world will have to get a lot crazier before Russia attacking mainstream Europe over relatively minor resources would be anything other than a suicide mission. Russia may be a little aggresive but they're not insane.
Whoever told that to you is an idiot.
You obviously don't have a clue how these companies behave. DRM -> piracy -> "See? We were right! MORE DRM!!!". I never said it's the way it should be, but it's reality. Deal with it.
Who cares? They can add as much DRM as they want. They can DRM themselves into fucking orbit for all I care, I ain't buying it.
I buy games that 1. are good and 2. are not too crazy with the restrictions. I suspect I am very far from alone - in fact from the general tone here I think I'm in the majority. Companies ignore us, then, at their peril.
I must be missing something here
Indeed you are. In fact, more than one thing.
writting software to run on windows is as easy as it gets
Here, you are missing that no-one is talking about writing software to run on windows.
If you want to integrate with non-windows machines just use webservies which are fully documented by MS and various other sources since SOAP and http are both standard protocols.
Here, you are missing that the problem is not a Windows developer integrating with other platforms, but third party developers integrating with Microsoft. In other words, yes, it is very easy to access an email server on linux from your Windows program. It is rather less easy to talk to an Exchange server successfully from Linux.
I refuse to pay attention to any Anti-trust investigations into MS unless Apple is put to the same scrutiny.
Here, you are missing the legal concept and reality of the "monopoly". Microsoft is a monopoly, Apple isn't, end of story.
Have to admit, though, I would like to see more open behaviour of Apple. They've recovered now, they don't need special treatment any more. We gave them a free pass for a while, but I think the day is coming when that pass will be revoked, if it hasn't already.
I would personally like to see OSX available for commodity hardware, with a strict HCL perhaps. I think it will happen. Either Apple does it or 3rd parties will (witness the recent USB solution) - I think it's inevitable.
Article submitter:
anomalous cohort (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/)
From the marketing "blog" linked in the summary (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cgi-bin/ViewBlogEntry.pl?id=14)
writing and maintaining developer documentation is an important part of any software development project [...] Another reason for documentation is compliance management [...] our collaborative software development project lifecycle management product Code Roller supports compliance management [...]
Nice try!
"I disagree with your business model, but rather than just do without your product and deprive you of a sale, I'd rather stea... err, share your product at no cost to myself"
Same result. The producer doesn't get the money. If the end user ends up satisfying himself via other means, what does it matter?
And it's not just a slight disagreement with some abstract business model, it's a matter of principle and practicality.
I have bought plenty of games, I like few things in life better than shooting up stuff in a good looking game. I took the day off work when half-life 2 was released, for example, in order to spend a wonderful, WONDERFUL long weekend playing it through. That cost me $129, by the way, I bought some super pack and I'm in Australia where everything is overpriced. I don't begrudge that money AT ALL. Seriously, is $50 or $100 or even $150 all that much these days?
By the way I bought a PS2 for the sole reason of playing MGS2. So that should give you some indication that I don't mind paying to have fun, and oh boy I had fun. My time is valuable, both to me and as a professional, and I don't mind spending money to enjoy myself. For fuck's sake I spent more than $100 last night just going out.
But when I buy a game, I have the expectation that I will be able to play that game, without hassle, indefinitely. I do not want other software installed, I do not want some intrusive crap screwing up an already temperamental Windows install (which I use solely for gaming). I do not want that and I will not pay money for it.
I have no problem whatsoever with anti-piracy techniques that I consider reasonable. Quake's system, of checking the key online but only for multiplayer, was probably my favourite but I didn't really mind Steam doing the same. That is reasonable. I understand they have to make money, hell I *want* them to make a lot of money so they can make more games for me to play!
But constantly running spyware? Interfering with Virtual Disk software? 3 installs maximum?
Fuck off with that fucking shit. In fact, as a generally good customer it makes me so angry I *want* to go torrent that crap.
But I don't even like downloading cracked software. It's always just some initial release, heaps of bugs, and never patched later. I don't want to spend my nights fighting some buggy cracked software. But no fucking way do I want to be ringing some god damn call centre one day begging to be allowed to install MY software that I BOUGHT.
I'm glad I mentioned Steam because in my mind that is the best balance yet between consumers and producer's rights. Sure some people don't like it, but I think it's great. And what's best about it is it offers some carrots, not just a stick.
The most wonderful thing about Steam is that it allows you to re-download your games without the CD/DVD! Once I was sitting in a rented apartment late at night in Tokyo with a Macbook Pro. I had jetlag, I was bored, had nothing to do. I thought, "I could really enjoy drinking some beer and playing HL2 about now!". I had a Windows disk (I always carry one, despite myself), installed Steam, told it to download all my games, went and bought the beer and 1 hour later I was playing. I think I became the biggest fan of Steam ever that night. Finally, a copy protection system that offers something back!!
This Securom shit is all stick and no carrot. And just installing it is being hit with the stick. Fuck that shit.
I don't really feel the need to go and download a cracked copy of Crysis Warhead, but if I did, I would have no moral qualms about it AT ALL.
You have a good point. T. Square was a pretty shameful episode and they've done an astoundingly good job of covering it up.
Or have they? I have 3 points of my own.
1. Most of the Chinese I have known knew all about Tiananmen Square. Does that mean they all do? Nope, the ones I knew are a pretty self-selecting mob, in that they were predisposed to be making friends with a foreign devil in the first place.
My point is, though, that anyone who wants to know, can find out. Think about it. What is the absolutely minimum information necessary to have a good understanding of what happened there? The wikipedia article, maybe? A PDF of that is 100K or so.
China's internet censorship is legendary, but even they can't possibly even think about stopping a determined person from somehow getting a 100K PDF file into China and emailing it around a bit. There are plenty of websites who provide such information and plenty of people willing to help. The censorship only stops the casual-interest type. This is pretty well known.
So why don't they all know? Same reason 99 out of 100 Americans (my guess) wouldn't know what the Kent State Massacre was. They don't want to know. They're embarrassed and ashamed of a pretty dark moment in their country's history. They are interested in getting on with their lives, not digging up painful dirt on their own country.
Is that pure censorship, or something more complex? You tell me.
2. TS was 20 years ago, and twenty years is a long time in the incredibly rapidly-changing world that is modern China. Again, I'm guessing, but I don't think they could get away with that today - or would even think about it. The fact is the capitalist train is running very nicely on track now. Everyone's happier, and the govt is a lot less nervous. And the people are more empowered, and know it, and the government knows it - why would they do something like that now?
I just don't see it happening, just like I don't see another Kent State happening. Times have changed.
3. With the proliferation of digital media technology, including capture devices, it would be a hell of a lot harder to disguise something like that. Say the rocket blows up a mile in the air. How many thousand people witness that? They can't shut ALL of them up, and the "internet rumour factory" there dwarfs that in western countries, perhaps understandably.
What would they do? Just shut off the video? Then everyone would know something went wrong. Try to fake it with CG? What .. the whole thing!? Including pictures in space, with people .. the spacewalk ..?
I don't think that's possible. Other countries would hint that they'd seen an explosion. Hell, amateurs with telescopes would report they couldn't find the purported orbital unit. They couldn't possibly get away with it, and the whole thing would backfire a million times worse than the Olympics thing.
I just can't see them even attempting to do something like that, they're not crazy.
So for all those reasons .. I don't think it's the same kind of situation. I can't give any credibility to the notion that the Chinese govt would even attempt to fake an entire space mission. Not in this day and age. They're not stupid, in fact anything but.
Exactly. Any major news company does this kind of thing if there's a big event coming that they know about; it's just part of being prepared.
You can just imagine how it went down - ask an intern to draft a victorious announcement. Jazz it up with some dialogue, use your imagination, etc. Sure, posting it ahead of time was pretty dumb, but hardly the huge conspiracy of deception that the summary makes it out to be - how exactly could you fake a successful rocket launch, anyway? Or more so - hide an explosive failure?
Ridiculous. It's much ado about nothing. I bet this happens every day.
And as for the "fake fireworks", I have another revelation for everyone - did you see that man who ran in the air all around the stadium? See him? Well, prepare to have your mind blown. Are you ready? Sure you're really ready? OK, get this:
He wasn't really flying!
And you're part of the problem. By frequenting all those websites, you're proving you don't mind all the duplicates.
You have two options if you actually want your problem solved:
1. Stop visiting offending sites. If enough people stop visiting Slashdot because the content is stale the editors/stakeholders will react soon enough.
2. Choose one site and stick with it.
Personally I just generally rely on Slashdot for tech news. If it's important, it'll probably be on here. If it's not important, I don't care anyway. That rule's held up pretty well for a while.
Er, I was responding to prockcore's comment, not yours!
Unless of course you have just inadvertently outed yourself as also being behind the sockpuppet prockcore, in which case your posts turn into an ironic "hoist by your own petard" take on the reliability of going by apparent names as the deciding factor of what is trustworthy information online.
So what you're saying is you're unable to separate the message from the messenger?
It doesn't matter a damn if IBM owns and operates Groklaw if the information on it is correct and stands up to scrutiny. To date, it has. So what's the problem?
In my opinion, the case of Groklaw is a great example of the public benefit of anonymous speech. If she had outed herself she might have been sued, pulled into court, lost her job, even physically harrassed. But by keeping her anonymity - and her integrity - she's been able to make a pretty big impact in the case, at least to us nerds who care about such things. She did exactly the right thing.
Names are meaningless. And even if you had it, what good what that do? What are you going to do, drive to that address, demand to see her bank statement to ensure there's no payments from IBM?
Where the information comes from is irrelevant. The quality of the information is the only thing that matters. Groklaw has stood the test of time, in my opinion, so you're doing yourself a disservice by downrating it on that basis.
Not calling you names, pal - just stating the facts.
And if by "bleach" you mean "icy cold Asahi Super Dry" then why yes, I think that's exactly what I'll do. Cheers! :)
PS. Pearl Harbour