So I'll revise my statement and say this will be the year that more big-name vendors officially support FreeBSD. By "vendor" I mean hardware guys like Dell, IBM or HP, not just software vendors.
I think while it isn't discussed much, GPLv3 made a lot of vendors think twice about Linux. My gut tells me that you'll quietly see more and more vendors back BSD based systems. There won't be much fanfare about it (the BSD world is pretty chill), but it will just slowly inch forward until most servers wind up running FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of $RANDOM_COLLECTION_OF_CODE.
Just a hunch. Times are changing, and I could be wrong...
The closest you'd get to an official java release (which I assume you mean is a binary compiled by Sun) is a binary package compiled by the FreeBSD guys. The only thing about FreeBSD packages is they usually lag behind the ports tree by several weeks.
Vendor support like what you are asking is one of the things FreeBSD and friends lack. My gut tells me that it won't be long before you'll see FreeBSD get enough mind share that companies like Sun start offering support.
At the risk of sounding like a freebsd fanboi
on
FreeBSD 7.1 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Nobody in BSD land gives a shit who does what with code. That is one of the nicest features found in BSD systems--the ecosystem is pretty much free of open-source politics.
Nobody give a shit if you wrote your patch on a windows system and mailed it to the ports maintainers using outlook. Nobody cares if Apple, Tivo, or Cisco "locks up the code". In fact, better they do. The BSD licence makes it easy for those companies to contribute because they can use FreeBSD and contribute only the parts that aren't special-sauce. Companies *want* to merge their changes in with the mainline, it is expensive to apply patches to every version of FreeBSD. The BSD licence lets paid employees of these companies send in bug-fixes and patches without ensnaring the companies IP in a legal mess. Other licences have a tendancy to be all-or-nothing--either you hold on to your bug-fixes and merge them in for every version or you release your entire codebase to the world. BSD lets you pick and choose what bits can go into the world. Very flexible.
Bottom line... if Apple wants to use BSD code, who cares. Code is code. It isn't like it has feelings.
Hardware suport for desktop users, yeah
on
FreeBSD 7.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
But honestly, FreeBSD is a server OS. And for servers, it has pretty much any driver you need. Granted not all of it is vendor supported binaries (yet, but hopefully someday), but still, if you have a server from *big-co*, odds are good everything will work.
And don't be nervous about making contributions either. My first ports looked like shit, but the port guys were patient and over time I've gotten the hang of the system.
FreeBSD (and probably the other BSD's) are much easier to work on then the other guys. For starters, since you are using a *system* and not a collection of libraries, all your patches and bug-reports go to the same place. In other words, you aren't talking to "the website and the people who maintain the 'tar' utility", you are talking to "the freebsd guys". Your patch for "tar" goes to the same repository as the code for "libc".
Plus since it is licensed as BSD, you can actually contribute modifications and not worry about the nasty side effects found in other licenses. I've never contributed to a GPL project, but I've contributed tons to BSD projects.
Bottom line, FreeBSD is a great place to get your feet wet contributing to open source stuff. Good times.
And that is the best niche for FreeBSD
on
FreeBSD 7.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As a lover of FreeBSD, I hope the guys in charge never try to "win the desktop". They'd never win and they'd stop paying attention to the stuff that makes it so good for servers. FreeBSD, and the other BSD's for that matter, belong in the data center. I'd argue the same for Linux, but that might get me slaughtered in these parts...
All the BSD's win for man pages that actually contain more information then "man pages are obsolete, please use the info documentation". In FreeBSD the entire core system has documentation. All of it written in the format god intended--roff.
Did you mention all the man pages are online and can be searched by version? Comes in handy when you are still using FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE.
And did you mention the fact that BSD's aren't like Linux distros? FreeBSD isn't just a pooling of libraries and code from random people, the core of FreeBSD (shell and userland tools) are all done by the same large team. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are *cohesive systems*, not collections.
Want my year 2009 prediction? This will be the year of the BSD's in the data-center. There is a lot going for BSD based systems, and quite frankly the only reason I can see to go back to a random collection of tools and kernel code (i.e. a Linux distrubtion) is for running code that requires vendor support (Oracle, Dell, etc...). In 2009, I predict (hope) more of these big-name vendors officially support FreeBSD and friends.
My nightmare is a bunch of companies with massive conflicts of interest issuing bullshit certificates. Nobody but nerds understand SSL and Mom and really even myself cannot tell what makes a good certificate "good".
I also think government SSL would actually increase innovation in other, more productive industries. Government issued SSL certificates would most likely mean everybody gets ones. That means things like S/MIME become widespread and SPAM gets harder. That means code signing becomes widespread and not something that costs $300 to $1000. That means with the right legislation non-profit open source companies could get SSL certificates for reduced cost.
Regulations have costs--no doubt. But sometimes the costs of non-regulation are higher. See also: the banking system.
These are valid questions, no doubt. Who oversees passports? I'd look real closely at how those get handled and steal the bits that work for them. There is a lot of overlap between the two.
With next to no legal recourse.
Once governments handle SSL, this becomes politics on an international level just like trade. If those damn Canadians don't stop with the crappy certificates, we Americans will just stop buying their maple syrup. Or something like that.
That said, ultimately "legal recourse" always distills down to who has the biggest guns.
Though I'm not 100% in agreement, I'll make a couple more arguments in your favor.
1) Vets also have a different set of budget constraints. My cat doesn't have a $2 million dollar insurance policy. 2) Vets have to take on a different role. They have to play "animal advocate" and drill some sense into people who bought animals they had no business buying. 3) It is socially acceptable to not do everything in our power to save fluffy. Sometimes the best, most humane option is merely to put the poor critter down.
I don't know what this means, but I do know psychologically I'd have a harder time dealing with the bullshit people put their animals through then dealing with what people put kids through. I suspect veterinarians have to develop quite a wall to cope with the shit they deal with.
As to which is smarter. I guess ultimately it depends. Veterinarians cannot specialize in a branch of medicine the way a doctor can. Sure there are probably vets who are really good at "fixing problem X on animal Y", but they are still expected to "fix problem Z on animal A" too. A doctor can specialize in a way where they could remove a tumor in your brain, but probably could never resuscitate you after a heart attack in an ER.
100 years from now, you will not be able to make a living as an anonymous coward suggesting that. However, "Then is When" has worked fairly successfully for me.
I am a computer guy, and the website is something I've created (perl + postgresql + freebsd = awesome). I have no problem with people calling me a computer guy:-) I've tried to hang my hat on other titles, but dammit, I'm a very good programmer and I can't fight that skill no matter how much it bugs me.
My comments here might make me sound further tilted toward "never annoyed", but in many respects I somewhat sympathies with the parent. For some reason I get annoyed with people who aren't the least bit curious about large construction projects or critical functions in their city (say, the steam plant). But honestly, I think I just prefer to hang out with geeky people who like discussing geeky things.
Surely since you are an IT professional, you can talk to me about the advances in GPUs. Which shader programming language is the best?
I bet you love when people ask you, "The computer guy" what you think about some computer topic you know nothing about. Obviously since you know about computers, you can help them install the game their kid downloaded for their RAZR, right?
You know what I hate more then what you hate? When people try to pretend they know about my profession more then I do. People who know just enough buzzwords of whatever I do that they have fooled themselves into thinking they know stuff I dont. And I dont know much, trust me.
But I dont really hate those kind of people. I just pity those people and hope someday they learn that they dont know nearly as much as they think they do.
I dont know a fucking thing about how to design an embedded software application, but I'm a computer guy. I dont know how to program for mainframes, but I'm a computer guy. I dont know (but I'm trying to learn) graphics programming, but I'm a computer guy. Should I, a "computer guy" know about all these topics in great detail?
The world is a big place. Maybe being a "metal guy" means more then just knowing about whatever steel type you read in a magazine? Maybe being an English teacher means knowing more then just "basic grammar rules" you read on "grammar-nazi.com". Maybe being a nurse means a fucking bit more then just knowing details about medications (hint, that is the doctors job, not the nurse, but obviously you know more about nursing then a nurse, so you knew that, right?). Maybe being a doctor means knowing more then just modern smoking complications?
The world is a big place. Bigger, maybe, then you can comprehend. It pays to be humble. Being a wise-ass know-it-all will just get you nowhere in life.
I have no confidence that fake SSL certs would be prosecuted.
Do governments crack down on people who fake their passports? If so, what is their motivation for doing so? How would their motivation for cracking down on SSL forgeries be any different?
You'd have the browser show which country issued the certificate. Use a flag, use something. Firefox already does this by using a tooltip.
Plus, unlike private companies, we all have a sense of which countries certificates we may or may not trust. A user would get suspicious if "bofa.com" was using a certificate issued by Nigeria or "tesco.com" had a certificate that wasn't issued in the UK. What the fuck is the difference between a certificate issued by Thwarte vs. Verisign? Beats me!
But I think for the right reasons. They are all about standing up for their patients, regardless of the background or circumstance.
The reason I think most of them hate all this new IT is because so little of it works right. Systems go down. System A doesn't talk with System B so the doctor can't get the charts from the nurse or the lab, etc...
While I'm no support guy for the nursing crowd, having lived with a nurse, I might suggest the best way to frame arguments against installing "BouncyMouse.exe" are in terms of "well, that application might infect the computer and violate the patients privacy". Pretty much every nurse I've met is a die-hard privacy nut, so this might be the best line of "user training". If they object, point out how pissed they'd be if the hospital installed keyboard sniffers to see how much they work... point out that these viruses would be pretty much doing the same thing (not really, but the details don't matter so much.. bottom line is either one is a privacy violation that can steal patient information). Do realize though that they probably view your IT policies as a violation of their own rights (even if it isn't).
But seriously, if there ever was an industry in need of good usability professionals, it is heathcare!
SSL certificates are one area best served by government. Bear with me here,
SSL certificates are the online version of your driver's license or your passport. We entrust our governments to provide us with reliable, trustworthy forms of identification. We know that if we see a driver's license or a passport, we can be reasonably certain the person holding said identification is who they claim.
It is becoming increasingly clear that SSL certificates issued by private industry cannot be trusted. Since private industry issues them, there are real standards for how one qualifies for a certificate. A $20 SSL cert from Godaddy is just as valid of identification as a $500 one from Verisign. Worse, the private industry has a conflict of interest. Their business makes money by issuing certificates to paying customers, not rejecting customers for bad information. The more stringent their policy, the more applicants they reject, and the less money they make. It is simple math, they have to make it as easy to get an SSL certificate as possible or go under. (The bond rating industry suffers from a different, but somewhat similar conflict of interest, actually)
Who then should issue certificates? The only entity that doesn't have to make money--your governments. Ideally you should be able to walk into whatever agency issues photo identification in your country and somehow get an SSL certificate issued. Businesses and non-profits could get them issued by checking a box on the form they use to set up a corporation or LLC.
Letting the government deal with this has many extra benefits. For starters, we could make SSL certificates fall under the same kinds of laws that govern passports or drivers licenses. If you forge one, or enter fake information, you could be charged under the same laws that faking a drivers license fall under. For second, if done right, good governments would issue these for virtually nothing and maybe protocols like S/MIME would finally get widespread adoption.
What about open source projects who currently cannot afford SSL certs? Well, if the government does it, they could file as a non-profit and get one for free (or reduced cost).
How would this work from a technical standpoint? How would browsers deal with a long list that has every countries certificate authority? Dunno, but it seems it wouldn't be a big problem. It is a technical problem though, so we can solve it somehow.
What international agency would regulate this? Who regulates passports? Dunno, but seems to me we already have a long history of internationally recognized identification--both for business and personal use. Why not task those guys with SSL certificates? This is more of a political problem, and isn't as easy to solve as the technical bits.
Bottom line, I know we all seem to hate more government, but SSL certificates are one thing governments should be doing, not private industries. It might create a new class of problems, but I suspect the new problems will be much less severe than the ones we have now.
If you really were the Smartest Poster On Slashdot, you'd be smart enough to know that in fact I was actually the Smartest Poster On Slashdot. Only I am smart enough to know that I am the Smartest Poster On Slashdot.
I took freshman economics in college. I've studied differential equations (which those business weenies never had to). I've written in assembler. Economics *has* to be easy, those guys never had to study calculus based physics! Same with marketing--those guys never studied assembler like I did, so how hard could their profession be!? I mean, just show the clients a plain text file that highlights which features in our product are better, and which are not and let the client decide!
Word to the wise, if your girlfriend or wife is a nurse and you claim that your engineering degree was harder then their nursing degree because they never took calculus, be prepared to spend the night on the couch. Just a tip.
Still, my $TYPE engineering degree makes me more then qualified to do any profession. Why, with a few books from the library and maybe a couple Google searches I could probably give your friend that kidney transplant they need. How hard could it be anyway, those overpaid doctors never had to work with Laplace transforms!
But I think the secret to "caring" is to pull yourself out of yourself, so to speak. Stop worrying about your existence and thing about how we as a society are evolving.
You are but a small twig on a mighty river. You might be able to paddle around a little bit. You can always choose which twigs you want float next to. You can always choose how you want to react to wherever the river takes you. But ultimately, you cannot control the path the river takes through the universe.
To put it more succinctly:
Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
They have trouble evaluating things that they are emotionally invested in (particularly things that affect them directly), but they do try on some level
Simply replace the word "They" with "I".
The dumbest, most miserable people on earth are those who cannot find fault in themselves.
Everybody on Slashdot has far less brain power then me. I'm sure if you ask anybody else, they would agree that they too are smarter then the rest of Slashdot. Why do you think we all post here? We are all smarter then everybody else here. We merely exist to point out how much of an idiot people not like us are.
If you point out that *I'm* and idiot, you are wrong because remember I'm the smartest Slashdot poster here. The point of contention then becomes the fact that you cannot have two "Smartest Slashdot Posters" and so we debate.
However, since everybody but me is an idiot, they lack the mental ability to understand how smart I truly am. This thought, that I alone am the only Smart Person On Earth, makes me depressed. However, I'm no idiot like the author of this "Ask Slashdot". Smart people dont "Ask" questions--they already know the answers. Questions are for clueless sheep.
Obviously I do have the answer to the "question", but only an idiot would give it--it would reward asking questions and thus reward not knowing things. Never answer questions, people should learn on their own. Any Smart Slashdot Poster knows this.
You are an idiot, I'm an idiot, we are all an idiot. A month ago, I called the cable company to complain about how the History Channel never seemed to come in clearly. The lady on the phone walked me through basic trouble shooting. She had me re-seat the coax connector on the back of the tuner. Well gee I thought, I had the wire tightened down to the back of the tuner with a cresent wrench, what will this solve? Guess what, after re-seating the damn thing, the History Channel worked like a charm.
Did I feel like an idiot for having to call for tech support only to have my problem resolved after walking through the "is the computer plugged in" level of troubleshooting? Yeah. But if I didn't call, the History Channel would still come in pretty shitty.
We are all idiots. All you can do is laugh at yourself and enjoy your life. When I did tech support, I enjoyed it simply because I enjoyed chatting with the people whose computer I was fixing, and I enjoyed how thankful most of them were that I was able to fix their black box.
I dont do tech support anymore, but it was a lot of fun when I did.
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So I'll revise my statement and say this will be the year that more big-name vendors officially support FreeBSD. By "vendor" I mean hardware guys like Dell, IBM or HP, not just software vendors.
I think while it isn't discussed much, GPLv3 made a lot of vendors think twice about Linux. My gut tells me that you'll quietly see more and more vendors back BSD based systems. There won't be much fanfare about it (the BSD world is pretty chill), but it will just slowly inch forward until most servers wind up running FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of $RANDOM_COLLECTION_OF_CODE.
Just a hunch. Times are changing, and I could be wrong...
The closest you'd get to an official java release (which I assume you mean is a binary compiled by Sun) is a binary package compiled by the FreeBSD guys. The only thing about FreeBSD packages is they usually lag behind the ports tree by several weeks.
Vendor support like what you are asking is one of the things FreeBSD and friends lack. My gut tells me that it won't be long before you'll see FreeBSD get enough mind share that companies like Sun start offering support.
Nobody in BSD land gives a shit who does what with code. That is one of the nicest features found in BSD systems--the ecosystem is pretty much free of open-source politics.
Nobody give a shit if you wrote your patch on a windows system and mailed it to the ports maintainers using outlook. Nobody cares if Apple, Tivo, or Cisco "locks up the code". In fact, better they do. The BSD licence makes it easy for those companies to contribute because they can use FreeBSD and contribute only the parts that aren't special-sauce. Companies *want* to merge their changes in with the mainline, it is expensive to apply patches to every version of FreeBSD. The BSD licence lets paid employees of these companies send in bug-fixes and patches without ensnaring the companies IP in a legal mess. Other licences have a tendancy to be all-or-nothing--either you hold on to your bug-fixes and merge them in for every version or you release your entire codebase to the world. BSD lets you pick and choose what bits can go into the world. Very flexible.
Bottom line... if Apple wants to use BSD code, who cares. Code is code. It isn't like it has feelings.
But honestly, FreeBSD is a server OS. And for servers, it has pretty much any driver you need. Granted not all of it is vendor supported binaries (yet, but hopefully someday), but still, if you have a server from *big-co*, odds are good everything will work.
And don't be nervous about making contributions either. My first ports looked like shit, but the port guys were patient and over time I've gotten the hang of the system.
FreeBSD (and probably the other BSD's) are much easier to work on then the other guys. For starters, since you are using a *system* and not a collection of libraries, all your patches and bug-reports go to the same place. In other words, you aren't talking to "the website and the people who maintain the 'tar' utility", you are talking to "the freebsd guys". Your patch for "tar" goes to the same repository as the code for "libc".
Plus since it is licensed as BSD, you can actually contribute modifications and not worry about the nasty side effects found in other licenses. I've never contributed to a GPL project, but I've contributed tons to BSD projects.
Bottom line, FreeBSD is a great place to get your feet wet contributing to open source stuff. Good times.
As a lover of FreeBSD, I hope the guys in charge never try to "win the desktop". They'd never win and they'd stop paying attention to the stuff that makes it so good for servers. FreeBSD, and the other BSD's for that matter, belong in the data center. I'd argue the same for Linux, but that might get me slaughtered in these parts...
All the BSD's win for man pages that actually contain more information then "man pages are obsolete, please use the info documentation". In FreeBSD the entire core system has documentation. All of it written in the format god intended--roff.
Did you mention all the man pages are online and can be searched by version? Comes in handy when you are still using FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE.
And did you mention the fact that BSD's aren't like Linux distros? FreeBSD isn't just a pooling of libraries and code from random people, the core of FreeBSD (shell and userland tools) are all done by the same large team. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are *cohesive systems*, not collections.
Want my year 2009 prediction? This will be the year of the BSD's in the data-center. There is a lot going for BSD based systems, and quite frankly the only reason I can see to go back to a random collection of tools and kernel code (i.e. a Linux distrubtion) is for running code that requires vendor support (Oracle, Dell, etc...). In 2009, I predict (hope) more of these big-name vendors officially support FreeBSD and friends.
You dont seem to worry that Verisign or Goddady has access?
My nightmare is a bunch of companies with massive conflicts of interest issuing bullshit certificates. Nobody but nerds understand SSL and Mom and really even myself cannot tell what makes a good certificate "good".
I also think government SSL would actually increase innovation in other, more productive industries. Government issued SSL certificates would most likely mean everybody gets ones. That means things like S/MIME become widespread and SPAM gets harder. That means code signing becomes widespread and not something that costs $300 to $1000. That means with the right legislation non-profit open source companies could get SSL certificates for reduced cost.
Regulations have costs--no doubt. But sometimes the costs of non-regulation are higher. See also: the banking system.
These are valid questions, no doubt. Who oversees passports? I'd look real closely at how those get handled and steal the bits that work for them. There is a lot of overlap between the two.
Once governments handle SSL, this becomes politics on an international level just like trade. If those damn Canadians don't stop with the crappy certificates, we Americans will just stop buying their maple syrup. Or something like that.
That said, ultimately "legal recourse" always distills down to who has the biggest guns.
Though I'm not 100% in agreement, I'll make a couple more arguments in your favor.
1) Vets also have a different set of budget constraints. My cat doesn't have a $2 million dollar insurance policy.
2) Vets have to take on a different role. They have to play "animal advocate" and drill some sense into people who bought animals they had no business buying.
3) It is socially acceptable to not do everything in our power to save fluffy. Sometimes the best, most humane option is merely to put the poor critter down.
I don't know what this means, but I do know psychologically I'd have a harder time dealing with the bullshit people put their animals through then dealing with what people put kids through. I suspect veterinarians have to develop quite a wall to cope with the shit they deal with.
As to which is smarter. I guess ultimately it depends. Veterinarians cannot specialize in a branch of medicine the way a doctor can. Sure there are probably vets who are really good at "fixing problem X on animal Y", but they are still expected to "fix problem Z on animal A" too. A doctor can specialize in a way where they could remove a tumor in your brain, but probably could never resuscitate you after a heart attack in an ER.
100 years from now, you will not be able to make a living as an anonymous coward suggesting that. However, "Then is When" has worked fairly successfully for me.
who? what? huh? I'm a bit confused here.
I am a computer guy, and the website is something I've created (perl + postgresql + freebsd = awesome). I have no problem with people calling me a computer guy :-) I've tried to hang my hat on other titles, but dammit, I'm a very good programmer and I can't fight that skill no matter how much it bugs me.
My comments here might make me sound further tilted toward "never annoyed", but in many respects I somewhat sympathies with the parent. For some reason I get annoyed with people who aren't the least bit curious about large construction projects or critical functions in their city (say, the steam plant). But honestly, I think I just prefer to hang out with geeky people who like discussing geeky things.
Very complex stuff :-)
Surely since you are an IT professional, you can talk to me about the advances in GPUs. Which shader programming language is the best?
I bet you love when people ask you, "The computer guy" what you think about some computer topic you know nothing about. Obviously since you know about computers, you can help them install the game their kid downloaded for their RAZR, right?
You know what I hate more then what you hate? When people try to pretend they know about my profession more then I do. People who know just enough buzzwords of whatever I do that they have fooled themselves into thinking they know stuff I dont. And I dont know much, trust me.
But I dont really hate those kind of people. I just pity those people and hope someday they learn that they dont know nearly as much as they think they do.
I dont know a fucking thing about how to design an embedded software application, but I'm a computer guy. I dont know how to program for mainframes, but I'm a computer guy. I dont know (but I'm trying to learn) graphics programming, but I'm a computer guy. Should I, a "computer guy" know about all these topics in great detail?
The world is a big place. Maybe being a "metal guy" means more then just knowing about whatever steel type you read in a magazine? Maybe being an English teacher means knowing more then just "basic grammar rules" you read on "grammar-nazi.com". Maybe being a nurse means a fucking bit more then just knowing details about medications (hint, that is the doctors job, not the nurse, but obviously you know more about nursing then a nurse, so you knew that, right?). Maybe being a doctor means knowing more then just modern smoking complications?
The world is a big place. Bigger, maybe, then you can comprehend. It pays to be humble. Being a wise-ass know-it-all will just get you nowhere in life.
Do governments crack down on people who fake their passports? If so, what is their motivation for doing so? How would their motivation for cracking down on SSL forgeries be any different?
You'd have the browser show which country issued the certificate. Use a flag, use something. Firefox already does this by using a tooltip.
Plus, unlike private companies, we all have a sense of which countries certificates we may or may not trust. A user would get suspicious if "bofa.com" was using a certificate issued by Nigeria or "tesco.com" had a certificate that wasn't issued in the UK. What the fuck is the difference between a certificate issued by Thwarte vs. Verisign? Beats me!
But I think for the right reasons. They are all about standing up for their patients, regardless of the background or circumstance.
The reason I think most of them hate all this new IT is because so little of it works right. Systems go down. System A doesn't talk with System B so the doctor can't get the charts from the nurse or the lab, etc...
While I'm no support guy for the nursing crowd, having lived with a nurse, I might suggest the best way to frame arguments against installing "BouncyMouse.exe" are in terms of "well, that application might infect the computer and violate the patients privacy". Pretty much every nurse I've met is a die-hard privacy nut, so this might be the best line of "user training". If they object, point out how pissed they'd be if the hospital installed keyboard sniffers to see how much they work... point out that these viruses would be pretty much doing the same thing (not really, but the details don't matter so much.. bottom line is either one is a privacy violation that can steal patient information). Do realize though that they probably view your IT policies as a violation of their own rights (even if it isn't).
But seriously, if there ever was an industry in need of good usability professionals, it is heathcare!
SSL certificates are one area best served by government. Bear with me here,
SSL certificates are the online version of your driver's license or your passport. We entrust our governments to provide us with reliable, trustworthy forms of identification. We know that if we see a driver's license or a passport, we can be reasonably certain the person holding said identification is who they claim.
It is becoming increasingly clear that SSL certificates issued by private industry cannot be trusted. Since private industry issues them, there are real standards for how one qualifies for a certificate. A $20 SSL cert from Godaddy is just as valid of identification as a $500 one from Verisign. Worse, the private industry has a conflict of interest. Their business makes money by issuing certificates to paying customers, not rejecting customers for bad information. The more stringent their policy, the more applicants they reject, and the less money they make. It is simple math, they have to make it as easy to get an SSL certificate as possible or go under. (The bond rating industry suffers from a different, but somewhat similar conflict of interest, actually)
Who then should issue certificates? The only entity that doesn't have to make money--your governments. Ideally you should be able to walk into whatever agency issues photo identification in your country and somehow get an SSL certificate issued. Businesses and non-profits could get them issued by checking a box on the form they use to set up a corporation or LLC.
Letting the government deal with this has many extra benefits. For starters, we could make SSL certificates fall under the same kinds of laws that govern passports or drivers licenses. If you forge one, or enter fake information, you could be charged under the same laws that faking a drivers license fall under. For second, if done right, good governments would issue these for virtually nothing and maybe protocols like S/MIME would finally get widespread adoption.
What about open source projects who currently cannot afford SSL certs? Well, if the government does it, they could file as a non-profit and get one for free (or reduced cost).
How would this work from a technical standpoint? How would browsers deal with a long list that has every countries certificate authority? Dunno, but it seems it wouldn't be a big problem. It is a technical problem though, so we can solve it somehow.
What international agency would regulate this? Who regulates passports? Dunno, but seems to me we already have a long history of internationally recognized identification--both for business and personal use. Why not task those guys with SSL certificates? This is more of a political problem, and isn't as easy to solve as the technical bits.
Bottom line, I know we all seem to hate more government, but SSL certificates are one thing governments should be doing, not private industries. It might create a new class of problems, but I suspect the new problems will be much less severe than the ones we have now.
If you really were the Smartest Poster On Slashdot, you'd be smart enough to know that in fact I was actually the Smartest Poster On Slashdot. Only I am smart enough to know that I am the Smartest Poster On Slashdot.
I took freshman economics in college. I've studied differential equations (which those business weenies never had to). I've written in assembler. Economics *has* to be easy, those guys never had to study calculus based physics! Same with marketing--those guys never studied assembler like I did, so how hard could their profession be!? I mean, just show the clients a plain text file that highlights which features in our product are better, and which are not and let the client decide!
Word to the wise, if your girlfriend or wife is a nurse and you claim that your engineering degree was harder then their nursing degree because they never took calculus, be prepared to spend the night on the couch. Just a tip.
Still, my $TYPE engineering degree makes me more then qualified to do any profession. Why, with a few books from the library and maybe a couple Google searches I could probably give your friend that kidney transplant they need. How hard could it be anyway, those overpaid doctors never had to work with Laplace transforms!
But I think the secret to "caring" is to pull yourself out of yourself, so to speak. Stop worrying about your existence and thing about how we as a society are evolving.
You are but a small twig on a mighty river. You might be able to paddle around a little bit. You can always choose which twigs you want float next to. You can always choose how you want to react to wherever the river takes you. But ultimately, you cannot control the path the river takes through the universe.
To put it more succinctly:
They have trouble evaluating things that they are emotionally invested in (particularly things that affect them directly), but they do try on some level
Simply replace the word "They" with "I".
The dumbest, most miserable people on earth are those who cannot find fault in themselves.
Everybody on Slashdot has far less brain power then me. I'm sure if you ask anybody else, they would agree that they too are smarter then the rest of Slashdot. Why do you think we all post here? We are all smarter then everybody else here. We merely exist to point out how much of an idiot people not like us are.
If you point out that *I'm* and idiot, you are wrong because remember I'm the smartest Slashdot poster here. The point of contention then becomes the fact that you cannot have two "Smartest Slashdot Posters" and so we debate.
However, since everybody but me is an idiot, they lack the mental ability to understand how smart I truly am. This thought, that I alone am the only Smart Person On Earth, makes me depressed. However, I'm no idiot like the author of this "Ask Slashdot". Smart people dont "Ask" questions--they already know the answers. Questions are for clueless sheep.
Obviously I do have the answer to the "question", but only an idiot would give it--it would reward asking questions and thus reward not knowing things. Never answer questions, people should learn on their own. Any Smart Slashdot Poster knows this.
You are an idiot, I'm an idiot, we are all an idiot. A month ago, I called the cable company to complain about how the History Channel never seemed to come in clearly. The lady on the phone walked me through basic trouble shooting. She had me re-seat the coax connector on the back of the tuner. Well gee I thought, I had the wire tightened down to the back of the tuner with a cresent wrench, what will this solve? Guess what, after re-seating the damn thing, the History Channel worked like a charm.
Did I feel like an idiot for having to call for tech support only to have my problem resolved after walking through the "is the computer plugged in" level of troubleshooting? Yeah. But if I didn't call, the History Channel would still come in pretty shitty.
We are all idiots. All you can do is laugh at yourself and enjoy your life. When I did tech support, I enjoyed it simply because I enjoyed chatting with the people whose computer I was fixing, and I enjoyed how thankful most of them were that I was able to fix their black box.
I dont do tech support anymore, but it was a lot of fun when I did.