It's not libel if you're just kidding. It's also not libel if you're not just kidding and you actually sincerely believe what you write. As long as you do not go so far as to say or imply that your assertions are of "actual fact".
Calling someone a crook and believing it (for example) seems to be ok, unless you cite allegations. And even then, if your allegations turn out to be true in some sense you probably have an affirmative defense.
Name calling, per se, seems to have been totally vindicated, even if (and probably especially if) you believe it. Calling someone a "Rat-bastard" or anything else does not seem to fall under libel laws even if offensive and demeaning.
The M$ moniker is perfectly legitimate and weakens nobody's position in the slightest.
Arguments are weakened by false or inaccurate premises, writing M$ gives a perfect idea of the bias of the poster Durr. Those two statements contradict each other. Yes, writing M$ DOES give a perfect idea of the bias of the poster...that is, a blind Microsoft hater that takes any opportunity to criticize them. You are just wrong. Those statements do not contradict each other, you are being illogical.
The GP is quite correct that an actual argument should not be weakened by a textual substitution of this type (proper noun to another "biased" proper noun (n.b. i claim that if it's being used as a proper noun then it certainly is one)). And it does give you a clue as to bias, which will help you decide what parts of the argument are biased in that manner.
Essentially your saying that if one uses M$ that argument in inherently weakened. The use of "M$" does not weaken the argument, one must actually look at the argument to decide if and how it was biased and that is what weakens their position. It does not matter if the person is a blind M$ hater if their arguments are sound.
Using "M$" in an argument only weakens that argument for people like you who appear to be swayed more by the appearance than the substance of the argument, whether you "like" people to use the term "M$" or not. I'd say, in fact, that your blind hatred of people who use "M$" appears to weaken your own logical capacity, as we see in this example.
What is pretty interesting, however, is the mosquitoes don't seem to worry much about the millions of people they're removing from the ecosystem. How is that interesting?
Do you expect the mosquitoes to form a cabal of sorts and secretly plot the destruction of humanity? Or is it interesting that they've not done so already? Or perhaps they should have halted their predations on humans (perhaps you could pass out pamphlets?).
You seem to want to create a dichotomy between people who care about the ecosystem as someone put it vs. people who don't using this logic. Catch me if I got this wrong, but you are advocating that because an instinctual (and perhaps even hard coded) intelligence cannot fathom the destruction it is causing, we should be the same way? That seems the only possible grounding your statement has.
I think this is actually working against your intended argument, however.
I would say that the equivalent to the "mosquitoes" in this case are those people who are comfortable with the destruction of another species without caring about the possible harm to the ecosystem. It's just one level up. Oh, and we do live here you know. In this particular biosphere. Fuck it up enough and we won't live here anymore. I imagine that the rest of the biosphere will go on without our input, though.
Yes, I'm well aware of the dangers of introducing species to new areas or making changes of any sort of an ecosystem. I just happen to think that saving so many human lives is worth the risk in this case. I'm sorry you don't feel the same way. And, just what are the risks, in your estimation? You advocated removing an entire species - the mosquito - from the earth's biosphere. And you have no problem with that, as it will save the lives of many humans.
But, I don't think you can even calculate the risks involved. I don't think anyone can. You glibly assert that the ecosystem can handle it. Well, yes, the earth's biosphere will likely continue without the mosquito, after a series of cascading readjustments before coming to a new equilibrium. Did you catch that last part? Cascading readjustments.
The question is not whether the ecosystem can handle it, but what effect will it have on a particular species - humans! Since that appears to be your end-all concern, I'm surprised that you don't seem to have thought it out that far. We have a short term gain in human lives saved and an unknown amount of risk of our ability to survive the new equilibrium.
Of course - it's obvious! The only organizational model that works is hierarchical, i should have known it's human nature. What narrow thinking and lack of faith your fellow human beings.
Right. Whatever. I see no need to continue this further.
The obvious question then is what went wrong? And the obvious answer is that with no government and no central authority any psycho who can recruit a few troops can conquer such a society. No, the obvious answer is that the Anarchists should have secured the military forces in the provinces they held instead of handing them all over to the communists. You see -- they thought that the communists were actually on their side! What noobs!
Any society that does not wish to defend itself can be conquered if someone can recruit the troops to do it. However, just because there is no central authority does not mean the people cannot band together to face a common threat without creating such a central authority.
You are creating a logical fallacy by saying that if there is no hierarchical authority then the society is indefensible. The conclusion does not spring fully formed from the premise at all.
Every movement is going to have people who are more prominent, more vocal, more charismatic, more eloquent or more passionate about it. These people tend to be called "leaders".
The question is - do the leaders have a disproportionate effect on the outcome of policy through out of band signaling or not?
Yes, of course you're trying to be funny but leadership does not mean hierarchy and the fact that you've confused the two is symptomatic of the sickness that is our current political spectrum.
I generally agree with your points however I'm wondering about this bit:
Microsoft are in the best position to find holes in vista, having the source code. They have no incentive to report them, and will just fix them silently. I don't think this is quite valid. While they can "not report them", they can't "fix them silently." As long as they have to update a machine not under their full control they cannot really fix them silently, per se (hosted apps are an interesting difference in this point). While they can be silent in human readable terms, the deltas in the components they ship talk for them. Anyone with the time and skills can eventually tell you exactly what each change did (wasn't there a Slashdot story a while back that made this point?). We can count the number of bugs they have fixed, it's just not as easy if they would be honest about it.
However, they can also just not tell people about them by not fixing them at all, which is somewhat more worrying IMO. Open source software does not really have the incentive to do this, but Microsoft and Apple both do, as do all closed source vendors, really.
I have worked for a few enterprise application development shops and not one was willing to give our complete internal bug list to customers or prospective customers, and even resisted customers who wished this access. Did I just work for the only companies that do this or is it widespread?
While I thought this was wrong, I could also see the point. Sure, releases contained descriptions of the bugs fixed but Sales surely isn't going to say - "and here's the current list of issues that other customers and our internal QA have found with the current product (the one we're trying to sell you on)." That might affect sales, you know, especially competing against companies that don't go the full disclosure route. Unfortunately.
As for dtrace working on every process: why? Your claim that 'system level tools' ==> work on any and every process is totally made up. It's not any different from stripping your binaries before shipping them off. If you can't see the difference between stripping a binary and disabling functionality there is no hope in me arguing with you, but I'll do so anyway.
Would you think that `ls` should not list iTunes.app if Apple wants to (for DRM reasons, of course!)? Or perhaps 'top' should not list an Apple process if it is taking a lot of CPU (which could reflect badly on that app)? These are of course absurd, but are of the same structural level as what has been done to DTrace (which should be absurd, but apparently is not to some people). To equate it to stripping a binary shows a lack of understanding.
Feel free to continue our conversation if you wish but I don't know what you're standing on.
Disclaimer: I am writing this on a MacBook Pro, my other Mac is a Mac Pro, though only the 2 core system (i could go for a Mac Pro 8 cores standard. How many effects can I run? grin). I use it for audio processing. I find that my MacBook Pro has problems even with Garage Band after more than a few tracks though the 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo w/ 2GB ram should do more than that, i would think! Maybe I'll put Logic Pro on it and see what happens. I also have a couple of Windows machines left, I also have Linux in VMware on my Mac, so, whatever.
Well, perhaps you should look at the history of Spain before declaring that Anarchy can't be "successful". It was pretty successful, by all balanced accounts.
Your caveat that it has to be "still working" is a red herring. It was working. It did work. It was crushed by the communist/fascist who had most of the leaders executed. Ironically, the only thing wrong with their Anarchist model was that they thought that others outside the movement were also as civilized as they were.
To say that it never existed if of course, false. It existed, there and in other places.
The question then, is not "does it work" but how might one make it sustainable? That is, how does the group protect their viability from outside forces?
Mac haters really are drama queens, aren't they? Here, read this.
Leopard's DTrace isn't broken. Apple put in an API for a program to request that debugging & dtrace be disabled for it. Clearly it's there to keep FairPlay from being broken (too easily). Something that commercial developers could understandably want for their software, to prevent keygen hacks, etc.
The link I provide shows a simple way to get around it. Hell, debugging iTunes is directly encouraged in an Apple Technote (linked in the article).
As listed in the article I linked to, you can get around it by trapping the API call in gdb and disabling it. Why are you standing up for Apple in this? By your own admission, DTrace is broken (oh yes, you can get around it, Bah!) Why in the world should you have to do any of that!
DTrace is a system level tool that should work properly on any and every process and thread in the system without smoke and mirrors.
Leopard's DTrace is broken. It does not do what it should.
There's no hating or drama about it. I don't care why they did it, and you're probably right that DRM is the reason. That doesn't mean it's not fubar'd.
Bad software costs $180B!
on
Geekonomics
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, that may be true. How much is good software going to cost us if everyone is liable for the code they write?
There are three avenues I can see that a company or individual doing development in the US could take if this becomes law:
1) Pay the costs to develop bug free software. 2) Stop developing software. 3) Move to a country with a less onerous position.
Of the three, the only one that is actually not feasible is 1! Why, you might ask? Because the company must make a profit, thus must sell the software for more than they developed it for.
Yes, the shuttle software has ~0 bugs. The cost of that has also been estimated at $1000 per LOC. Apache, for example, might have around 81852 lines of code... $81,852,000, which is not bad considering! The linux kernel (2.6) ~5.2M LOC. Hmm $5B??? Not to mention the glacial pace that shuttle sw moves. The pace Hurd is moving at would look like light speed compared to changes to any medium to large sized codebase.
But, you might say, what about people who give their software away for free? After all, I just used Apache and linux as examples of what it might cost if commercially developed but they were not! We could just get all that work for free. Free!
Well, show of hands - who wants to give some software away for free and be liable for the results? Put something up as an individual and one lawsuit (even if wrongly brought) is enough to bankrupt you. I guess there is always posting anonymously but I assume any distributor of the software would then be liable. How many projects on SourceForge would be available if either the contributors (non-anonymous) or SourceForge (for anonymous projects) were liable? Likewise e.g. RedHat, could all be held responsible for not only code they wrote but what they distribute if it was anonymous code.
Then there are shared objects like libraries. Is is misuse of the library by the end developer that caused the issue or a bug in the library itself? Or should this have been caught by the QA of the end developer? Are both liable? It could get very entertaining.
So, we may be experiencing $180B loss for bad software, but I happen to think that we might lose much much more if software liability were a reality.
Not that MS, IBM, Oracle, Apple, Adobe, RedHat, etc... would ever allow this to happen.
Please note: Nothing in the above states that I'm for buggy software being written. I believe that we simply don't have the tools to liability proof these types of products yet in a cheap, fast way. We can write good software. We can even write great software. But that one bug you didn't catch is the one they will sue you for.
Original Sin is the condition of being "apart" from God - that is that you are in some way separate from the divine. To me, this condition occurred when we reached a high enough level of consciousness to internally mirror the outer world to the point of recognising a 'self' or being that is doing the mirroring. The disequilibrium caused by another actor appearing on the stage of our consciousness caused a split; our consciousness became dissonant.
As such this flow has little to do with evolution besides the fact that evolution provided us with the substrate which made such consciousness possible. Even though there is no literal Adam, each of us goes through stages into the recognition of the Self, most every human "falls". For those who want to, I believe they can be reconciled in this manner.
However, to me, the "fall" is also a necessary step towards our own Godhood, our own union with the Divine. It is through recognition and acceptance of the Self - gnothi sauton - that one can act in a more divine way towards other beings. The issue comes with people either not interested in that journey for some reason or who feel that they've completed it. Every act has the possibility to inform you more about yourself and the universe. Every act has the possibility of bringing you closer to the divine.
YMMV. Buddhists can sub in Nirvana or what have you, Atheists perhaps a "more balanced psyche", Cthulu Cultists "the divine madness of Ubbo-Sathla", i suppose.
Not to say that people who use Visual Studio are worse coders than those who don't, but you appear to be validating the point by saying that there are many less Unix dev positions.
Consider the pool of people who want to develop in Unix or even Linux, commercially. Quite large, right? Now, there are only jobs for 10% of those people. Well, which 10% of those people get the jobs on average, the least qualified (worse) or the more qualified (better) developers?
It's because there are so many jobs for Windows that statistically speaking HR scrapes more than just the cream off the top to fill the available positions.
Of course, this says absolutely nothing about a specific individual -- only that if you know their day job is writing Windows applications there's a better probability they are not in the top 10% of coders than someone writing Unix commercial software. A specific individual writing Windows code may be able to hand you your hat on a platter in any fair comparison.
Of course, this only holds true if programmers in general would prefer and seek out Unix or Linux positions than Windows positions.
There is, of course, another side to this that is not entirely elitist bullshit.
The question is, how, exactly, does one clean up the bot-nets out there?
The fact is that people conform to what they measure. Many people keep track of their money. Not many look at their logfiles. If you want to change their behaviour, the easiest way is through their pocketbook.
When an unfortunate pwned computer owner receives a bill for $300 the ISP should be able to tell him what it was for. In fact, if they dug into their server logs, they could probably tell him what version(s) of what malware he has. I imagine they would refund him money the first time this happened.
At this point, the customer has a choice, clearly spelled out by the ISP - clean up your machine, pay for the bandwidth that your system is using including any bandwidth used by malware every month or find another ISP.
This also provides incentives for people to check their bandwidth usage to make sure they aren't hosting malware and to clean it out ASAP if they are. I would bet that more people would know more about how computer security works if this happened and there would be less infections.
So if done properly, the ISP should only lose those people who habitually become infected and refuse to do something about it and refuse to become educated on the matter.
Is it wrong to not want those people on your network? I guess that's elitist.
The fact is there are a lot of people who are intelligent and not tech-savvy, either because they grew up too late and are stuck in a pre-Internet mindset, or just don't have the aptitude for tech; but these people still have plenty to contribute online, and cutting them off just because you think they're "lusers" is foolish and short-sighted. They are only not welcome, in my book, if they never learn to follow basic sanity checks for using the resources. My take on it is that the people you are talking about just don't have the incentive to do the painful thing and learn. Most of the harm caused by their rogue systems is externalized. This is about bringing that back and helping them internalize it, you know, so they have more of an incentive. I don't see what is wrong with removing harmful systems from the internet if their owners are uncooperative even if they are very nice people otherwise.
This may be marked funny now. Ask me in 10 years if i still find it so.
I'm hoping the answer is yes, but when has a corporation not tried to maximize profits in any way possible?
I can see pricing schemes and bandwidth limits, caps, protocol packages, etc, all designed so that they don't have to upgrade infrastructure and can make more in aggregate than they are now.
No, it's not completely ridiculous. We can talk about generalities as long as we want but they are nothing but straw men. This is a specific case, and it appears to be a special case, where the defendant had an injunction against him to prevent him from harassing the company in question.
Essentially, the judge ruled that the injunction did indeed include the DNS servers the company had. Imagine that, he got that one right!
IOW, even if the company was running a web server on port 80 and require no authentication, it can easily be assumed that --- the defendant would still be barred from making requests to that page. No, not people in general one specific individual who was barred from interacting with the company.
Just like people continue to think "prostitution" is a gateway crime and therefore want laws strictly enforced. Prostitution is a gateway crime -- it might lead to becoming a Politician.
Oh come on now, how much of a fanboy do you have to be to think that modifying your own web pages in a way you see fit is equivalent to committing a crime because Google doesnt like it? Google has no right to tell people what they can and cant do on the internet, they are not the law. Doing something they dont like is not equivalent to breaking the law. I agree it's not the equivalent of breaking the law. However, Google's algorithms are designed to show a user the most relevant sites for their search queries. While they have no right to tell people what they can and can't do on the internet they do have every right to stop indexing your site if you don't follow their rules.
If their algorithm doesnt handle other people's websites doing certain things very well they should fix their algorithm, not demand that everyone play by their rules and design their websites in a way which doesnt mess up their algorithm. Black Hat SEO techniques are generally about mis-representing your site. That is, lying to the search engine about it through gaming the existing algorithms. This is essentially equivalent to lying to the end user. While it's not a crime to lie to either the algo or the end user it does leave one in a less moral and ethical position than someone who does not do so.
So, it can be taken an indication that the site you're dealing with might be willing to engage in other behaviours which are less than ethical, some of which might even be law breaking. Or, to put it another way, it seems to me that if company "X" utilizes Black Hat SEO practices, the probability of them actually breaking laws is greater than a company who does not.
Which I believe was the actual content of TFA? Who would have thought!
Broadly speaking CC works well, but with photography, it's a particularly thorny issue because there's a lot more complexity in how copyright and other legal issues work with a photo. The problem you tend to run into with CC is that people use it pretty liberally without thinking about the consequences of it. The vast majority of people generating all this media under a CC license don't really understand all the ramifications of it. A case that recently came up was that somebody took a photo of a kid, and then that photo was picked up by a company that used it for commercial purposes. The child's parent never signed a release for the photo. This is a model release issue, not a CC license issue. The company did not do due diligence and obtain a model release from the person in the picture and thus wasn't legally able to use the photo anyway, nevermind the CC license. If I put a picture of you in the public domain, it still doesn't give a company leave to use the photo - they must obtain a release from the person in the photo.
Now, this isn't a problem with CC per se, but people will often license content under CC without realizing that, technically they may not have all the rights to do what they are doing. When I take photos, I put them on Flickr under a CC license but I use the no commercial use clause. This simplifies matters because, given that it's not for money, there's far less implications for somebody using my images. I would say that you are incorrect - someone who takes a photo has every right to license the copyright however they want. The license is for the photograph, which the photographer does have the copyright to. Does that mean that as a user I can take that photo and do whatever I want with it? No! Do your due diligence if you want to license a copyrighted work - there might be issues for the licensee (and probably are if you want to use it commercially).
Now why is this different from using the default copyright license? Because in that case, the areas that tend to get you into trouble are not permitted by default. If you go to my site and take a copyrighted image and use it commercially, you've clearly broken the law. If you go and take my CC licensed image, you're okay with me, but it doesn't mean I was okay in the first place. Nobody's likely to sue you for just showing an image on your Flickr account, but it's very different when you're talking about using an image in marketing materials, etc. So, you are saying that if I falsely claim to have copyrighted a particular work (is this what you meant by "it doesn't mean I was okay in the first place"?) and you use it commercially you've clearly broken the law? Perhaps, but I've clearly broken the law first, by putting a CC license on something that I don't own. Your own malfeasance is much narrower if you used the work in good faith. You might have to take down the work, for example, right on up to paying royalties and damages (if you used it commercially). But as others have pointed out this is not a flaw with CC at all - it's the same as if I removed your copyright and inserted mine instead (no CC involved!).
If you're referring back to the model release issue I believe our current crop of laws cover that nicely. The gist of which is (I believe) - it's okay to put up pictures on Flikr with any license without obtaining model releases for the people involved IF you don't use any of those commercially. If someone does want to use them commercially (including the original poster) they must obtain a release.
Since in almost every article, especially science and technology articles that require a broad understanding and depth to write coherently about, most writers mis-understand the interviewees (either willfully or through ignorance) this appears like it could be an excellent feature. A conscientious interviewee could fill in the gaps or correct misunderstandings the journalist missed and give us a more complete picture.
This could then turn into an ad-hoc rating system for journalists. How many articles did they write that were corrected? How good is their basic understanding of what someone said vs. what they actually meant? What way(s) did they colour the interviewees thoughts with their own biases? How many interviewees reputiate quotes (I did not say that!)?
It has a pretty good chance to work IF people are cognizant of it, assuming that if someone gives an interview they are at least attached enough to their own reputation to make sure the journalist gets what they are saying right. I know if I were mis-quoted or misunderstood I wouldn't want people to get the idea that I actually said/meant X instead of Y.
In addition to technological issues involved (battery fatigue, grid coupling, etc.), how many people are going to be willing to gamble this way with their means of transportation?
It's like having a $random amount of gas in your car every day and (here's the kicker) not being able to top it off quickly. Now, many people people would never be caught by this, as they "never" drive more than 20 miles a day or something. Never say "never".
For many other people all it takes is the supposition that there could be a time where they unexpectedly need a car but don't have one that is juiced enough. Then, there will be those adopters who actually do get bit by this issue, to greater or lesser degrees.
I suppose that this could get more people to plan their lives out - putting their car "on system" or off depending on what they expect to do the next day but I certainly wouldn't count on it.
And she'll scrape you off her shoes when she has no further use for you. Remember, this is a person who had no connection to the city or state of NY before she decided to run for senate; if NY's residency laws for candidates were even remotely sane, she would have gone to another state, and someone else would be talking about "done more for XYX in the few years she's had than most XYZ senators do in a lifetime". And here's why partisanship is such a bad idea. You admit that Hillary has done more for NY in a few years than most NY senators do in a lifetime. You go on to say that she would have done this well in any random state.
Oh my God, how horrible! She really must hate the American people to do that, to show up all those other politicians, I mean. You're like the Union workers who put the thumb on the new guy who's doing "too much", except it's only too much for you when the other party is doing it.
If she does for the country what she did for NY then... she would know the top issues of every state and the country as a whole, be able to list what she did about each issue - and the list would be substantive, not fluff.
Now, you might have a point if the "stuff" she did were an anathema to your values or political views, but... did you even note that the parent said even their Republican relatives voted for her because she gets stuff done?
Note: I am not endorsing Hillary here it's just that it does not make any sense to bash her based on a trait that most everyone else in the world would view as a good thing, oh except that the carrier is not in my "in group".
Slashdot Mirror
Calling someone a crook and believing it (for example) seems to be ok, unless you cite allegations. And even then, if your allegations turn out to be true in some sense you probably have an affirmative defense.
Name calling, per se, seems to have been totally vindicated, even if (and probably especially if) you believe it. Calling someone a "Rat-bastard" or anything else does not seem to fall under libel laws even if offensive and demeaning.
Arguments are weakened by false or inaccurate premises, writing M$ gives a perfect idea of the bias of the poster Durr. Those two statements contradict each other. Yes, writing M$ DOES give a perfect idea of the bias of the poster...that is, a blind Microsoft hater that takes any opportunity to criticize them. You are just wrong. Those statements do not contradict each other, you are being illogical.
The GP is quite correct that an actual argument should not be weakened by a textual substitution of this type (proper noun to another "biased" proper noun (n.b. i claim that if it's being used as a proper noun then it certainly is one)). And it does give you a clue as to bias, which will help you decide what parts of the argument are biased in that manner.
Essentially your saying that if one uses M$ that argument in inherently weakened. The use of "M$" does not weaken the argument, one must actually look at the argument to decide if and how it was biased and that is what weakens their position. It does not matter if the person is a blind M$ hater if their arguments are sound.
Using "M$" in an argument only weakens that argument for people like you who appear to be swayed more by the appearance than the substance of the argument, whether you "like" people to use the term "M$" or not. I'd say, in fact, that your blind hatred of people who use "M$" appears to weaken your own logical capacity, as we see in this example.
Is that enough "M$"s?
Do you expect the mosquitoes to form a cabal of sorts and secretly plot the destruction of humanity? Or is it interesting that they've not done so already? Or perhaps they should have halted their predations on humans (perhaps you could pass out pamphlets?).
You seem to want to create a dichotomy between people who care about the ecosystem as someone put it vs. people who don't using this logic. Catch me if I got this wrong, but you are advocating that because an instinctual (and perhaps even hard coded) intelligence cannot fathom the destruction it is causing, we should be the same way? That seems the only possible grounding your statement has.
I think this is actually working against your intended argument, however.
I would say that the equivalent to the "mosquitoes" in this case are those people who are comfortable with the destruction of another species without caring about the possible harm to the ecosystem. It's just one level up. Oh, and we do live here you know. In this particular biosphere. Fuck it up enough and we won't live here anymore. I imagine that the rest of the biosphere will go on without our input, though.
But, I don't think you can even calculate the risks involved. I don't think anyone can. You glibly assert that the ecosystem can handle it. Well, yes, the earth's biosphere will likely continue without the mosquito, after a series of cascading readjustments before coming to a new equilibrium. Did you catch that last part? Cascading readjustments.
The question is not whether the ecosystem can handle it, but what effect will it have on a particular species - humans! Since that appears to be your end-all concern, I'm surprised that you don't seem to have thought it out that far. We have a short term gain in human lives saved and an unknown amount of risk of our ability to survive the new equilibrium.
Of course - it's obvious! The only organizational model that works is hierarchical, i should have known it's human nature. What narrow thinking and lack of faith your fellow human beings.
Right. Whatever. I see no need to continue this further.
Any society that does not wish to defend itself can be conquered if someone can recruit the troops to do it. However, just because there is no central authority does not mean the people cannot band together to face a common threat without creating such a central authority.
You are creating a logical fallacy by saying that if there is no hierarchical authority then the society is indefensible. The conclusion does not spring fully formed from the premise at all.
Every movement is going to have people who are more prominent, more vocal, more charismatic, more eloquent or more passionate about it. These people tend to be called "leaders".
The question is - do the leaders have a disproportionate effect on the outcome of policy through out of band signaling or not?
Yes, of course you're trying to be funny but leadership does not mean hierarchy and the fact that you've confused the two is symptomatic of the sickness that is our current political spectrum.
However, they can also just not tell people about them by not fixing them at all, which is somewhat more worrying IMO. Open source software does not really have the incentive to do this, but Microsoft and Apple both do, as do all closed source vendors, really.
I have worked for a few enterprise application development shops and not one was willing to give our complete internal bug list to customers or prospective customers, and even resisted customers who wished this access. Did I just work for the only companies that do this or is it widespread?
While I thought this was wrong, I could also see the point. Sure, releases contained descriptions of the bugs fixed but Sales surely isn't going to say - "and here's the current list of issues that other customers and our internal QA have found with the current product (the one we're trying to sell you on)." That might affect sales, you know, especially competing against companies that don't go the full disclosure route. Unfortunately.
Would you think that `ls` should not list iTunes.app if Apple wants to (for DRM reasons, of course!)? Or perhaps 'top' should not list an Apple process if it is taking a lot of CPU (which could reflect badly on that app)? These are of course absurd, but are of the same structural level as what has been done to DTrace (which should be absurd, but apparently is not to some people). To equate it to stripping a binary shows a lack of understanding.
Feel free to continue our conversation if you wish but I don't know what you're standing on.
Disclaimer: I am writing this on a MacBook Pro, my other Mac is a Mac Pro, though only the 2 core system (i could go for a Mac Pro 8 cores standard. How many effects can I run? grin). I use it for audio processing. I find that my MacBook Pro has problems even with Garage Band after more than a few tracks though the 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo w/ 2GB ram should do more than that, i would think! Maybe I'll put Logic Pro on it and see what happens. I also have a couple of Windows machines left, I also have Linux in VMware on my Mac, so, whatever.
Ok, so that got OT but well, so what?
Cheers!
Well, perhaps you should look at the history of Spain before declaring that Anarchy can't be "successful". It was pretty successful, by all balanced accounts.
Your caveat that it has to be "still working" is a red herring. It was working. It did work. It was crushed by the communist/fascist who had most of the leaders executed. Ironically, the only thing wrong with their Anarchist model was that they thought that others outside the movement were also as civilized as they were.
To say that it never existed if of course, false. It existed, there and in other places.
The question then, is not "does it work" but how might one make it sustainable? That is, how does the group protect their viability from outside forces?
Leopard's DTrace isn't broken. Apple put in an API for a program to request that debugging & dtrace be disabled for it. Clearly it's there to keep FairPlay from being broken (too easily). Something that commercial developers could understandably want for their software, to prevent keygen hacks, etc.
The link I provide shows a simple way to get around it. Hell, debugging iTunes is directly encouraged in an Apple Technote (linked in the article).
As listed in the article I linked to, you can get around it by trapping the API call in gdb and disabling it. Why are you standing up for Apple in this? By your own admission, DTrace is broken (oh yes, you can get around it, Bah!) Why in the world should you have to do any of that!
DTrace is a system level tool that should work properly on any and every process and thread in the system without smoke and mirrors.
Leopard's DTrace is broken. It does not do what it should.
There's no hating or drama about it. I don't care why they did it, and you're probably right that DRM is the reason. That doesn't mean it's not fubar'd.
Well, that may be true. How much is good software going to cost us if everyone is liable for the code they write?
There are three avenues I can see that a company or individual doing development in the US could take if this becomes law:
1) Pay the costs to develop bug free software.
2) Stop developing software.
3) Move to a country with a less onerous position.
Of the three, the only one that is actually not feasible is 1! Why, you might ask? Because the company must make a profit, thus must sell the software for more than they developed it for.
Yes, the shuttle software has ~0 bugs. The cost of that has also been estimated at $1000 per LOC. Apache, for example, might have around 81852 lines of code... $81,852,000, which is not bad considering! The linux kernel (2.6) ~5.2M LOC. Hmm $5B??? Not to mention the glacial pace that shuttle sw moves. The pace Hurd is moving at would look like light speed compared to changes to any medium to large sized codebase.
But, you might say, what about people who give their software away for free? After all, I just used Apache and linux as examples of what it might cost if commercially developed but they were not! We could just get all that work for free. Free!
Well, show of hands - who wants to give some software away for free and be liable for the results? Put something up as an individual and one lawsuit (even if wrongly brought) is enough to bankrupt you. I guess there is always posting anonymously but I assume any distributor of the software would then be liable. How many projects on SourceForge would be available if either the contributors (non-anonymous) or SourceForge (for anonymous projects) were liable? Likewise e.g. RedHat, could all be held responsible for not only code they wrote but what they distribute if it was anonymous code.
Then there are shared objects like libraries. Is is misuse of the library by the end developer that caused the issue or a bug in the library itself? Or should this have been caught by the QA of the end developer? Are both liable? It could get very entertaining.
So, we may be experiencing $180B loss for bad software, but I happen to think that we might lose much much more if software liability were a reality.
Not that MS, IBM, Oracle, Apple, Adobe, RedHat, etc... would ever allow this to happen.
Please note: Nothing in the above states that I'm for buggy software being written. I believe that we simply don't have the tools to liability proof these types of products yet in a cheap, fast way. We can write good software. We can even write great software. But that one bug you didn't catch is the one they will sue you for.
Well, I'm not a Christian now, but how's this:
Original Sin is the condition of being "apart" from God - that is that you are in some way separate from the divine. To me, this condition occurred when we reached a high enough level of consciousness to internally mirror the outer world to the point of recognising a 'self' or being that is doing the mirroring. The disequilibrium caused by another actor appearing on the stage of our consciousness caused a split; our consciousness became dissonant.
As such this flow has little to do with evolution besides the fact that evolution provided us with the substrate which made such consciousness possible. Even though there is no literal Adam, each of us goes through stages into the recognition of the Self, most every human "falls". For those who want to, I believe they can be reconciled in this manner.
However, to me, the "fall" is also a necessary step towards our own Godhood, our own union with the Divine. It is through recognition and acceptance of the Self - gnothi sauton - that one can act in a more divine way towards other beings. The issue comes with people either not interested in that journey for some reason or who feel that they've completed it. Every act has the possibility to inform you more about yourself and the universe. Every act has the possibility of bringing you closer to the divine.
YMMV. Buddhists can sub in Nirvana or what have you, Atheists perhaps a "more balanced psyche", Cthulu Cultists "the divine madness of Ubbo-Sathla", i suppose.
Not to say that people who use Visual Studio are worse coders than those who don't, but you appear to be validating the point by saying that there are many less Unix dev positions.
Consider the pool of people who want to develop in Unix or even Linux, commercially. Quite large, right? Now, there are only jobs for 10% of those people. Well, which 10% of those people get the jobs on average, the least qualified (worse) or the more qualified (better) developers?
It's because there are so many jobs for Windows that statistically speaking HR scrapes more than just the cream off the top to fill the available positions.
Of course, this says absolutely nothing about a specific individual -- only that if you know their day job is writing Windows applications there's a better probability they are not in the top 10% of coders than someone writing Unix commercial software. A specific individual writing Windows code may be able to hand you your hat on a platter in any fair comparison.
Of course, this only holds true if programmers in general would prefer and seek out Unix or Linux positions than Windows positions.
The question is, how, exactly, does one clean up the bot-nets out there?
The fact is that people conform to what they measure. Many people keep track of their money. Not many look at their logfiles. If you want to change their behaviour, the easiest way is through their pocketbook.
When an unfortunate pwned computer owner receives a bill for $300 the ISP should be able to tell him what it was for. In fact, if they dug into their server logs, they could probably tell him what version(s) of what malware he has. I imagine they would refund him money the first time this happened.
At this point, the customer has a choice, clearly spelled out by the ISP - clean up your machine, pay for the bandwidth that your system is using including any bandwidth used by malware every month or find another ISP.
This also provides incentives for people to check their bandwidth usage to make sure they aren't hosting malware and to clean it out ASAP if they are. I would bet that more people would know more about how computer security works if this happened and there would be less infections.
So if done properly, the ISP should only lose those people who habitually become infected and refuse to do something about it and refuse to become educated on the matter.
Is it wrong to not want those people on your network? I guess that's elitist. The fact is there are a lot of people who are intelligent and not tech-savvy, either because they grew up too late and are stuck in a pre-Internet mindset, or just don't have the aptitude for tech; but these people still have plenty to contribute online, and cutting them off just because you think they're "lusers" is foolish and short-sighted. They are only not welcome, in my book, if they never learn to follow basic sanity checks for using the resources. My take on it is that the people you are talking about just don't have the incentive to do the painful thing and learn. Most of the harm caused by their rogue systems is externalized. This is about bringing that back and helping them internalize it, you know, so they have more of an incentive. I don't see what is wrong with removing harmful systems from the internet if their owners are uncooperative even if they are very nice people otherwise.
This may be marked funny now. Ask me in 10 years if i still find it so.
I'm hoping the answer is yes, but when has a corporation not tried to maximize profits in any way possible?
I can see pricing schemes and bandwidth limits, caps, protocol packages, etc, all designed so that they don't have to upgrade infrastructure and can make more in aggregate than they are now.
Of course, to not properly close your tags or preview foolish!
No, it's not completely ridiculous. We can talk about generalities as long as we want but they are nothing but straw men. This is a specific case, and it appears to be a special case, where the defendant had an injunction against him to prevent him from harassing the company in question.
Essentially, the judge ruled that the injunction did indeed include the DNS servers the company had. Imagine that, he got that one right!
IOW, even if the company was running a web server on port 80 and require no authentication, it can easily be assumed that --- the defendant would still be barred from making requests to that page. No, not people in general one specific individual who was barred from interacting with the company.
To rule otherwise is nothing but pure stupidity.
So, it can be taken an indication that the site you're dealing with might be willing to engage in other behaviours which are less than ethical, some of which might even be law breaking. Or, to put it another way, it seems to me that if company "X" utilizes Black Hat SEO practices, the probability of them actually breaking laws is greater than a company who does not.
Which I believe was the actual content of TFA? Who would have thought!
Cool. Thanks for the succinct info!
If you're referring back to the model release issue I believe our current crop of laws cover that nicely. The gist of which is (I believe) - it's okay to put up pictures on Flikr with any license without obtaining model releases for the people involved IF you don't use any of those commercially. If someone does want to use them commercially (including the original poster) they must obtain a release.
Since in almost every article, especially science and technology articles that require a broad understanding and depth to write coherently about, most writers mis-understand the interviewees (either willfully or through ignorance) this appears like it could be an excellent feature. A conscientious interviewee could fill in the gaps or correct misunderstandings the journalist missed and give us a more complete picture.
This could then turn into an ad-hoc rating system for journalists. How many articles did they write that were corrected? How good is their basic understanding of what someone said vs. what they actually meant? What way(s) did they colour the interviewees thoughts with their own biases? How many interviewees reputiate quotes (I did not say that!)?
It has a pretty good chance to work IF people are cognizant of it, assuming that if someone gives an interview they are at least attached enough to their own reputation to make sure the journalist gets what they are saying right. I know if I were mis-quoted or misunderstood I wouldn't want people to get the idea that I actually said/meant X instead of Y.
In addition to technological issues involved (battery fatigue, grid coupling, etc.), how many people are going to be willing to gamble this way with their means of transportation?
It's like having a $random amount of gas in your car every day and (here's the kicker) not being able to top it off quickly. Now, many people people would never be caught by this, as they "never" drive more than 20 miles a day or something. Never say "never".
For many other people all it takes is the supposition that there could be a time where they unexpectedly need a car but don't have one that is juiced enough. Then, there will be those adopters who actually do get bit by this issue, to greater or lesser degrees.
I suppose that this could get more people to plan their lives out - putting their car "on system" or off depending on what they expect to do the next day but I certainly wouldn't count on it.
Oh my God, how horrible! She really must hate the American people to do that, to show up all those other politicians, I mean. You're like the Union workers who put the thumb on the new guy who's doing "too much", except it's only too much for you when the other party is doing it.
If she does for the country what she did for NY then... she would know the top issues of every state and the country as a whole, be able to list what she did about each issue - and the list would be substantive, not fluff.
Now, you might have a point if the "stuff" she did were an anathema to your values or political views, but... did you even note that the parent said even their Republican relatives voted for her because she gets stuff done?
Note: I am not endorsing Hillary here it's just that it does not make any sense to bash her based on a trait that most everyone else in the world would view as a good thing, oh except that the carrier is not in my "in group".