This stuff is dangerous - make no bones about it. But splitting hairs about shoulda, coulda, wouldas gets us nowhere. These guys are the test pilots for the future of travel, like it or not. Test pilots die from time to time. You know it, NASA knows it and be damned sure THEY knew it.
The Shuttle design is 30 years old. We've learned what we can from it and it's time to take what we've learned and build something safer. The fact that there are people crazy enough to fly it doesn't mean we should let them. If the Shuttle stays in the air, it's going to kill people for no good reason. The place for the Shuttle fleet is in the National Air and Space museum, not earth orbit.
Sending people up again in it just to discover another lethal failure mode is pointless. Did the Wright Brothers fly their original plane for 30 years just to find out how many different ways a rev 0.1 release can kill somebody?
But only in a situation where the suits and the tech people are energized by a common vision where they're for practical purposes, putting every waking hour into making that vision real.
As one of the PHMs who ought to be replaced, I mean. Do you hate Dilbert because the comic strip says things about PHMs that you feel compelled to take personally? Good, you're exactly the kind of person Scott Adams had in mind.
Engineers in the real world try to make things work. The biggest problem with this is managers who share your beliefs who believe that problems can be wished away by managerial fiat.
The escalation you whine about was blocked by the action of a bureaucrat at the wrong place and the wrong time, and people died.
This isn't an engineering problem, it's a business process problem and in general, the solution is finding management like you and terminating it and putting procedures in place which will make future managers of the type you support disappear. This is just as important as increasing the budget, because it makes sure that the new money goes into solving the real problems, not into management perks or bureaucratic empire building. The purpose of an organization is to get things done. To fulfill this purpose in a new technology organization which means making new things, the engineers must be supported by management. The engineers are the people who have to solve the problems. The proper place of management is to give them the tools and to fight for budget and priorities with upper management. Any other managerial function in an technology R&D organization that isn't concerned with sales and marketing is secondary at best and parasitic at worst.
Once upon a time, there was a political system whose management believed the country's problems could be solved by bureaucratic edict instead of with people finding out what the problems really were at an empirical level and solving them. The Soviet Union failed its reality check, just like NASA has repeatedly. The Soviet Union no longer exists. Perhaps it's time for NASA to follow it.
Space travel is dangerous. Live with the danger or get out of the business.
Ships were once dangerous. Automobile travel was once dangerous. Airplanes were once dangerous. Living in the America was once dangerous. Every new human domain has been paid for in blood. The problems were solved and now, kids can play outside in California suburbs without fear of being eaten by predators, they can fly in airliners without fear of following the trail of the Challenger astronauts.
The shuttle is not an example of how to deal with the dangers of space travel. Since it was designed, there have been 30 years of aerospace research and development. Can a new earth to LEO vehicle be designed with safety comparable to the DC-3? I think it's time to find out. Perhaps it can't be done, but we can't find out unless it's tried.
The DC-3 was a lot safer than anything that came before it. The modern jet airliner of today is a hell of a lot safer than the DC-3. It's called engineering progress, and that progress happens because engineers figure out what the problems are and their managers support them in getting the resources to implement the solutions. Not because PHMs attack them because they're saying things they don't want to hear.
Space travel is dangerous because Congress won't appropriate the funds to do what needs to be done to make it safe. This is largely because NASA management has not been able to make a case for it that Congress can understand. Even at the level of "if we don't, our astronauts will keep raining down on your constituents in barbecued chunks". Where is the engineering incompetence in this?
Where are the program directors with the integrity to say "We need this amount of money to put humans safely into space. If you won't give it to us, then you'll have to find other people willing to kill astronauts in order to give you guys good PR."
Either Congress should come up with the funds to develop a vehicle whose design takes into account what has been learned in the last 30 years or admit that America can't afford a real space program and leave the field to the private sector, the Indians, and the Chinese.
You sound like a 16 year old who heard about all the musicians who've decided to do without record labels and said "What clu3l3ss luz3rz, all the more money for m3!"
Your position with respect to what's in your contract is also similar.
If you're lucky, you'll get the money and a VC willing to work his Roladex (it will not be a contacts database) for you. And if you actually manage to build a real company with real products that people will be buying. . . your real troubles will begin. You will believe that you're having troubles with VCs as you build that company. I've personally been involved with two companies that have been sunk by their investors mixture of stupidity combined with greed long before the IPO point. Neither at decisionmaking levels, though I've still got 1K shares of stock in one of them. So I got to watch the fun as an outsider.
Not to say that I'm immune to stupidity and greed, I've done the money hunt myself. However, now, I'm not sorry about the negative results.
Basically, you're using your technology or business model as a lottery ticket. Or more accurately, as a chance to use yourself as live bait as you go fishing for sharks.
Please ignore the above now and keep doing what you're doing, I just want you to remember it when the time comes.
By then, you'll understand why I regard VCs as generally irrelevant to the creation of interesting technology.
They are the courts, not the legistlators. Calling the courts only increases bureacratic workload, calling your legistlators gets things changed.
No, going to the legislators' offices in person with campaign contribution checks in thousand dollar increments gets things changed. Ask the *AA organizations how this works.
@Stake just blew off a big chunk of their credibility. Is there anybody around here who was thinking about hiring them who hasn't changed their minds yet?
If they want MS as their sole client, that's one thing.
Their publically firing a whistleblower for being part of a group writing a negative article about MS software tells me that @stake can never be trusted again in any statement they make about MS software, operating systems, or security procedures. So what's the upside for a non-MS client to hire them?
Is anybody left at @stake from the old l0pht days?
Or do we have to wait until fuckedcompany.com reveals it?
Are you the 5th, 8th, or 10th company in your technology space?
So you think you've been anointed by the VCs as THE NEXT BIG THING. Well, Renaissance Ventures apparently still thinks SCO is the NEXT BIG THING, too. Perhaps your backers are just as good at picking winners.
There was once a time when people were impressed by what VCs consider the NEXT BIG THING. That time is considered ancient history by most. Good luck on finding suck... I mean, er, people willing to accept stock options instead of money.
bernard Lunn [Concordia Consulting LLC] | POSTED: 09.18.03 @05:26
In case you still have any illusions about writing a business plan and getting a few million dollars of venture capital, here is the wake up call. It won?t happen. Period.
OK, maybe you think, ?I can get angel money to build the prototype and then get some money to get it to market.? Sorry, that used to be true but the goal post just got moved again.
Bottom line article summary: unless you are in a position where you can make a business case to tards whose home VCRs blink 12:00 that you need at least $10M and that you'll be able to turn that into a $1000M net cap, don't bother looking for US VC funding.
Given this, what's the interest for slashdot readers? There's no reason for anyone who actually makes technology to care what USA VCs are doing.
What kind of patriot turns tail and runs? I can't stand it when flag-hugging idiots spout that shitty "love it or leave it" copout.
From the evidence I've seen, a country where the decisions are made by "benevolent" multinationals is exactly the kind of place where Americans want to live. Some of the evidence of this comes from our own community.
Why don't we have a PAC capable of going head to head with "the big boys"? Because all of our high-tech millionaires, including the ones who read slashdot would rather put their money into things that give them immediate rewards instead of making the investment required to build a free country that might make it possible to build more profitable products in the future.
Democracy got sold in America to the highest bidder a generation ago. Unfortunately, the highest bidder is run by CEOs whose time horizon is whatever will increase the short-term value of his company enough to trigger his options in the next 90 days.
America is heading for the cliff, and the reaction of the average American voter is to blindly trust the mass media which says that the cliff doesn't exist and that The Man In The White House knows what he's doing and will look after our interests.
Fix it? This isn't "fighting the weather", this is fighting long-term climate change. A democracy whose citizens aren't interested in preserving democracy isn't going to stay one.
You and I can't make citizens want to think for themselves.
Why not Wordpad? It is simple, has no macro capability, puts out.DOC and.RTF files, is not all that resource intensive, and doesn't have the file size limits of Notepad. And it's part of every Windows distro. I maintain webpages in it and do most of my word processing in it, often starting a document in it, doing all the text entry, and putting it into Word if it needs formatting or pagination.
As for *nix console text editors, I use pico. One doesn't have to memorize arcane commands, it has a bottom horizontal menu with simple control character commands just like the old BBS text editors. Finding it is easy enough, google is your friend.
So how is this different to MS having multiple attempts to resolve their security bugs ? I don't see a difference.
The difference is that the OpenSSH people found the problem themselves and announced the fix with the problem. While the MS people do this, they usually wait until there's egg all over their face. The MS people also have a few billion more dollars to work with. You can buy a lot of code auditing with a few billion dollars. Well, you or I could. MS has other priorities.
No, the concerns become irrelevant when we make extreme and unsupportable statements. Take extreme views, and get ignored. You may think you need to go to a new country -- I have quite effectively lobbied against the very interests you claim to be untouchable -- and it was not by taking extreme positions.
Evidence, please. That you have the slightest clue as to what you're talking about or that your lobbying has had any effect will do. Has the DMCA disappeared before your eyes or something?
While the legislation is similar, which is hardly surprising considering the real points of origin, the situations in the EU and US are completely different. Look up my post on this thread for discussion of the EU situation. It appears that people from our community talking to theirs may actually be able to work out common ground and come up to a consensus. In large part, because the US "points of origin" (the Hollywood cartel and Microsoft/BSA) can not throw around millions in campaign cash into EU elections.
I'm better qualified to speak about the US situation.
Money talks, bullshit walks.
In a real sense, how "extreme" the concerns of the community in favor of freedom for computer users and developers are completely irrelevant.
Whether the positions are moderated or made even more extreme means absolutely nothing.
Given a decently funded PAC along the lines of the NRA or AARP funded by individual $5 and $20 and $100 contributions aggregated into contributions big enough to match what Hollywood is handing out and tons of faxes (NOT e-mails!) the politicians will not only treat our positions with respect, but frequently act on them, especially if we concentrate on politicians the *AA and MS hasn't seen fit to hand campaign money to.
Unfortunately, none of the high-tech millionaires and billionaires who made their pile largely off our work as well as their own have seen fit to provide the leadership required, i.e. the willingness to spend a few megabucks of their own money in order to build a political organization capable of hiring the top-bracket political lobbyistss with checkbooks needed to keep our situation from going into the crapper. What they have done when they've done anything at all is spend just enough money in DC to protect their own narrow and selfish interests. So instead of stopping DMCA, they bought extension of H1B instead. As computer security research is forced to move out of the US, they'll simply outsource it to where it can be done, in the cases where they decide to fix their product line security problems instead of depending on the ability to use the DMCA and computer anti-hacking legislation to suppress computer security research publication. The vulns will still be out there, we just will have to sit there and take them because we aren't able to legally publically share the info required so we can handle response to attacks as a community.
The multimillionaires and frequently, billionaires of the Hollywood cartel have shown no such reluctance, and MS learned from the antitrust case that buying politicians to represent their interests is a good investment.
While you are actually correct about our community's need for representation, it has demonstrated that nobody in a position to pay the price of freedom while it still can be paid in dollars gives a flying fuck. And so, soon, the freedom to use the computers we paid for as we see fit instead of the way our corporate masters want them to be used is going to vanish. History will say that our freedom vanished without a fight. Correctly.
Our "geek-activism" as represented by the EFF and Public Knowledge is basically meaningless in this context. This kind of fight is one that non-profit organizations can not effectively participate in regardless of funding level simply because it is illegal for non-profit organizations to contribute to political campaigns. This kind of fight can not be won without our community buying its own politicians.
It's already too late for the US high-tech community to win this kind of fight, even if the money became available now, it's unlikely that the FEC and state election committee filing deadlines can be complied with in order to allow a high-tech community PAC to raise and spend money on/for/against candidates in time for Election Day 2004.
So, if you want freedom of computing. . . time to start shopping for a new country to live in.
"People always get the kind of local government they deserve"
E.E."Doc"Smith
The only people in our community in a position to act chose to do nothing.
Zero-g, cheap access to solar energy, cheap access to lunar resources... lower costs of manufactured products, and lots of new jobs in orbital facilities.
The infrastructure can also be used to build powersats relatively cheaply. Would the Third World benefit from being able to buy power cheaper than they can get it in the form of oil from the Arabs? Would we? The other obvious point is that the sun isn't running out of juice anytime soon, which is something we can't say about oil.
That's just the beginning. Space elevators can throw the whole Solar System open to industrial exploitation.
Public campaign financing makes. While I've heard there are serious problems with the EU government as a functioning democracy, I was very impressed to find that MEPs with staff members willing to spend 45 minutes listening to individuals not representing massive multinationals or organized pressure groups, and staff members willing to admit that they really didn't understand the issues and were willing to accept help from "just plain folk".
Of course, the main factor here that helped is that the positions of the MEPs were not formulated to win campaign contributions from lobbyists.
In the "land of democracy", the chances that a handful of people can actually get people to listen without massive campaign budgets are a lot smaller.
As I've said, though the EU has done some very wrongheaded things with respect to legislation and technology, the odds on getting them to stop doing them may be considerably better than in the USA if individuals will organize and put in their time and individual-scale money to . . . do something. The war isn't lost there yet. Perhaps it won't be.
The one point that I think based on the article didn't get made as strongly as it should be is that NOT passing software patent bills gives the EU an advantage the USA with respect to individual and small business contributions to technology of the sort that leads to businesses that provides jobs and that the EU can tax.
Remember that the committments of legislators to follow the lead of the US aren't as strong as that of US legislators who got campaign contribution from interested multinationals, i.e. except for a few, I'd guess that a great many are willing to listen to reason if the reason is put in terms that they can understand.
Props to the people who lobbied on behalf of us all.
Find out how it really works at OpenSecretsIt makes looking up political contributions by legislator, donor, or industry easy.
It'll explain, for instance, how Fritz Hollings got drafted into helping a Hollywood cartel over 3000 miles against the interests of the people who elected him.
There is a difference between legality and morality.
There are governments which have declared the existence of ethnic groups illegal. (I'm thinking about Africa) Can mass murder be made moral by making it legal?
As for this being a democracy. . . all people are created equal, but in the transition between democracy and regime, some are much more equal than others.
Donate millions to a major political party and/or its elected public officials and like the *AA organizations, you become much more equal.
The ability to buy a law doesn't make disobeying it illegal.
Quote from the paper: For this reason it is effectively impossible to sanitise storage locations by simple overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written. However by using the relatively simple methods presented in this paper the task of an attacker can be made significantly more difficult, if not prohibitively expensive."
The program I use in Windoze to erase/overwrite files does 30 passes according to the principles set forth in the paper. If I were storing really sensitive info on it, I'd do as the Department of Defense does and physically destroy the media.
If you ever have to handle confidential information, depend on the info in the paper I linked to, not your guesses. This isn't a matter of research that needs to be done, this is work that was done years ago by people really motivated to find out the right answers.
Now, I've got to get an update for the program, which is oddly enough, called Eraser. Wish there were a Linux port.
can sing together "If I only had a brain". The difference? All the Tin Man needed was confidence. You have a bigger problem.
Telecommunications has already made a big difference to Third World lifestyles. Video-based (television, etc.) lessons in sanitation, farming techniques, first aid, etc. result in healthier, better fed people who need less medical care.
In an area with few doctors and medical facilities, paramedics with telecommunications-based access to superior medical expertise can make a very large difference to people's health. A solution where the US can provide satellite-based communications and the Ethiopians only have to pay for low-cost terminal uplinks that can be put in remote areas is something the Ethiopians might be able to afford.
There have been several articles posted in slashdot where people posting from the Third World tell us about the things people can do who have access to telecommunications that have made the lives of peasants better. In the face of smug, superior people who think they can tell the poor what they really need.
One other thing. If you want to know why a lot of the poor all over the world hate the USA. . . look in the mirror.
If we don't start serious development work on the infrastructure required to make cheap space-based energy alternatives NOW, technological civilization has perhaps a generation to go due to the fact that the oil is running out.
We know powersats can be built (solar cells work well in vacuum, we know how to build microwave energy transfer systems, the rest is detail), which is something we do *NOT* know about hydrogen fusion power plants.
Alternative and renewable energy sources and conservation at best stretch out the time we've got to find a better solution than fossil fuels.
The problem with pre-release for the industry is that real stinkers get trashed before release and nobody goes to see them before they hit the theaters.
While they might be willing to lose a few megabucks on promoting their legal agenda, anybody who is willing to trash a movie's ability to at least make it's costs back in order to make a legal point is going to get his ass fired. You don't make friends in Hollywood by losing $50 or $100M of somebody else's money.
The movie industry is just as evil as the record industry, but not nearly as stupid.
Anyone who knows about the history of the DMCA knows that the RIAA and MPAA are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The DMCA was a result of joint effort. So is the arguably worse Broadcast Protection Discussion Group proposals.
Through a combination of intelligent design, lucky accident and the good sense to follow the consumer's lead, movie companies settled on the VHS video format for 25 years before gently introducing a DVD alternative.
Try lucky accident. Jack Valenti of the MPAA is the guy who said that home taping would kill the movie industry when he was trying to get Congress to stop it. If they'd had their way, there would have been no VHS.
The main difference between the MPAA and RIAA is that the MPAA companies had sense enough to pick a lower price point and add extra content over and above the movie.
Why is the MPAA fighting alongside the RIAA to kill filesharing?
P2P pirating of movies simply isn't economically significant. The bandwidth to the home just isn't there yet and isn't going to be as ubiquitous as the TV for years and years.
So what's the problem?
Same as the RIAA, it's about control. When those broadband pipes to the home are in place, it'll be possible for the next Steven Spielberg to make a movie on his desktop with capabilities better than the best high-end Hollywood has to offer now, rendering and special effects courtesy of a closet full of PCs loaded with high-end programmable video cards... and consumers will be able to download it.
Where is Hollywood in this picture?
For them, that's the problem.
So they're willing to go along with the RIAA on proposals that'll turn the Net into a controlled domain where the only audio/video entertainment content available for public distribution will be "blessed" by Hollywood.
Why is the RIAA out there all by itself suing 12 year olds?
It seems that the RIAA is being the "bad guy" to the MPAA "good guy", and this makes no sense. Gangs of scumbuckets don't make sacrifies for each other unless there's benefit in store for them.
The problem here is that the "Patriot" mistake we call a law is that it's being used for things that it was not intended for.
The problem is that it is being used as intended. It's just that the public and Congress were lied to as to what the intended effects are. I never believed that the PATRIOT Act was intended to stop terrorism.
Slashdot Mirror
The Shuttle design is 30 years old. We've learned what we can from it and it's time to take what we've learned and build something safer. The fact that there are people crazy enough to fly it doesn't mean we should let them. If the Shuttle stays in the air, it's going to kill people for no good reason. The place for the Shuttle fleet is in the National Air and Space museum, not earth orbit.
Sending people up again in it just to discover another lethal failure mode is pointless. Did the Wright Brothers fly their original plane for 30 years just to find out how many different ways a rev 0.1 release can kill somebody?
I don't think I need to discuss how rare that is.
Engineers in the real world try to make things work. The biggest problem with this is managers who share your beliefs who believe that problems can be wished away by managerial fiat.
The escalation you whine about was blocked by the action of a bureaucrat at the wrong place and the wrong time, and people died.
This isn't an engineering problem, it's a business process problem and in general, the solution is finding management like you and terminating it and putting procedures in place which will make future managers of the type you support disappear. This is just as important as increasing the budget, because it makes sure that the new money goes into solving the real problems, not into management perks or bureaucratic empire building. The purpose of an organization is to get things done. To fulfill this purpose in a new technology organization which means making new things, the engineers must be supported by management. The engineers are the people who have to solve the problems. The proper place of management is to give them the tools and to fight for budget and priorities with upper management. Any other managerial function in an technology R&D organization that isn't concerned with sales and marketing is secondary at best and parasitic at worst.
Once upon a time, there was a political system whose management believed the country's problems could be solved by bureaucratic edict instead of with people finding out what the problems really were at an empirical level and solving them. The Soviet Union failed its reality check, just like NASA has repeatedly. The Soviet Union no longer exists. Perhaps it's time for NASA to follow it.
Space travel is dangerous. Live with the danger or get out of the business.
Ships were once dangerous. Automobile travel was once dangerous. Airplanes were once dangerous. Living in the America was once dangerous. Every new human domain has been paid for in blood. The problems were solved and now, kids can play outside in California suburbs without fear of being eaten by predators, they can fly in airliners without fear of following the trail of the Challenger astronauts.
The shuttle is not an example of how to deal with the dangers of space travel. Since it was designed, there have been 30 years of aerospace research and development. Can a new earth to LEO vehicle be designed with safety comparable to the DC-3? I think it's time to find out. Perhaps it can't be done, but we can't find out unless it's tried.
The DC-3 was a lot safer than anything that came before it. The modern jet airliner of today is a hell of a lot safer than the DC-3. It's called engineering progress, and that progress happens because engineers figure out what the problems are and their managers support them in getting the resources to implement the solutions. Not because PHMs attack them because they're saying things they don't want to hear.
Space travel is dangerous because Congress won't appropriate the funds to do what needs to be done to make it safe. This is largely because NASA management has not been able to make a case for it that Congress can understand. Even at the level of "if we don't, our astronauts will keep raining down on your constituents in barbecued chunks". Where is the engineering incompetence in this?
Where are the program directors with the integrity to say "We need this amount of money to put humans safely into space. If you won't give it to us, then you'll have to find other people willing to kill astronauts in order to give you guys good PR."
Either Congress should come up with the funds to develop a vehicle whose design takes into account what has been learned in the last 30 years or admit that America can't afford a real space program and leave the field to the private sector, the Indians, and the Chinese.
You sound like a 16 year old who heard about all the musicians who've decided to do without record labels and said "What clu3l3ss luz3rz, all the more money for m3!"
Your position with respect to what's in your contract is also similar.
If you're lucky, you'll get the money and a VC willing to work his Roladex (it will not be a contacts database) for you. And if you actually manage to build a real company with real products that people will be buying. . . your real troubles will begin. You will believe that you're having troubles with VCs as you build that company. I've personally been involved with two companies that have been sunk by their investors mixture of stupidity combined with greed long before the IPO point. Neither at decisionmaking levels, though I've still got 1K shares of stock in one of them. So I got to watch the fun as an outsider.
Not to say that I'm immune to stupidity and greed, I've done the money hunt myself. However, now, I'm not sorry about the negative results.
Basically, you're using your technology or business model as a lottery ticket. Or more accurately, as a chance to use yourself as live bait as you go fishing for sharks.
Please ignore the above now and keep doing what you're doing, I just want you to remember it when the time comes.
By then, you'll understand why I regard VCs as generally irrelevant to the creation of interesting technology.
No, going to the legislators' offices in person with campaign contribution checks in thousand dollar increments gets things changed. Ask the *AA organizations how this works.
If they want MS as their sole client, that's one thing.
Their publically firing a whistleblower for being part of a group writing a negative article about MS software tells me that @stake can never be trusted again in any statement they make about MS software, operating systems, or security procedures. So what's the upside for a non-MS client to hire them?
Is anybody left at @stake from the old l0pht days?
Or do we have to wait until fuckedcompany.com reveals it?
Are you the 5th, 8th, or 10th company in your technology space?
So you think you've been anointed by the VCs as THE NEXT BIG THING. Well, Renaissance Ventures apparently still thinks SCO is the NEXT BIG THING, too. Perhaps your backers are just as good at picking winners.
There was once a time when people were impressed by what VCs consider the NEXT BIG THING. That time is considered ancient history by most. Good luck on finding suck... I mean, er, people willing to accept stock options instead of money.
Forget about VC (until you don't need it)
bernard Lunn [Concordia Consulting LLC] | POSTED: 09.18.03 @05:26
In case you still have any illusions about writing a business plan and getting a few million dollars of venture capital, here is the wake up call. It won?t happen. Period.
OK, maybe you think, ?I can get angel money to build the prototype and then get some money to get it to market.? Sorry, that used to be true but the goal post just got moved again.
Bottom line article summary: unless you are in a position where you can make a business case to tards whose home VCRs blink 12:00 that you need at least $10M and that you'll be able to turn that into a $1000M net cap, don't bother looking for US VC funding.
Given this, what's the interest for slashdot readers? There's no reason for anyone who actually makes technology to care what USA VCs are doing.
What kind of patriot turns tail and runs? I can't stand it when flag-hugging idiots spout that shitty "love it or leave it" copout.
From the evidence I've seen, a country where the decisions are made by "benevolent" multinationals is exactly the kind of place where Americans want to live. Some of the evidence of this comes from our own community.
Why don't we have a PAC capable of going head to head with "the big boys"? Because all of our high-tech millionaires, including the ones who read slashdot would rather put their money into things that give them immediate rewards instead of making the investment required to build a free country that might make it possible to build more profitable products in the future.
Democracy got sold in America to the highest bidder a generation ago. Unfortunately, the highest bidder is run by CEOs whose time horizon is whatever will increase the short-term value of his company enough to trigger his options in the next 90 days.
America is heading for the cliff, and the reaction of the average American voter is to blindly trust the mass media which says that the cliff doesn't exist and that The Man In The White House knows what he's doing and will look after our interests.
Fix it? This isn't "fighting the weather", this is fighting long-term climate change. A democracy whose citizens aren't interested in preserving democracy isn't going to stay one.
You and I can't make citizens want to think for themselves.
As for *nix console text editors, I use pico. One doesn't have to memorize arcane commands, it has a bottom horizontal menu with simple control character commands just like the old BBS text editors. Finding it is easy enough, google is your friend.
The difference is that the OpenSSH people found the problem themselves and announced the fix with the problem. While the MS people do this, they usually wait until there's egg all over their face. The MS people also have a few billion more dollars to work with. You can buy a lot of code auditing with a few billion dollars. Well, you or I could. MS has other priorities.
Evidence, please. That you have the slightest clue as to what you're talking about or that your lobbying has had any effect will do. Has the DMCA disappeared before your eyes or something?
I'm better qualified to speak about the US situation.
Money talks, bullshit walks.
In a real sense, how "extreme" the concerns of the community in favor of freedom for computer users and developers are completely irrelevant.
Whether the positions are moderated or made even more extreme means absolutely nothing.
Given a decently funded PAC along the lines of the NRA or AARP funded by individual $5 and $20 and $100 contributions aggregated into contributions big enough to match what Hollywood is handing out and tons of faxes (NOT e-mails!) the politicians will not only treat our positions with respect, but frequently act on them, especially if we concentrate on politicians the *AA and MS hasn't seen fit to hand campaign money to.
Unfortunately, none of the high-tech millionaires and billionaires who made their pile largely off our work as well as their own have seen fit to provide the leadership required, i.e. the willingness to spend a few megabucks of their own money in order to build a political organization capable of hiring the top-bracket political lobbyistss with checkbooks needed to keep our situation from going into the crapper. What they have done when they've done anything at all is spend just enough money in DC to protect their own narrow and selfish interests. So instead of stopping DMCA, they bought extension of H1B instead. As computer security research is forced to move out of the US, they'll simply outsource it to where it can be done, in the cases where they decide to fix their product line security problems instead of depending on the ability to use the DMCA and computer anti-hacking legislation to suppress computer security research publication. The vulns will still be out there, we just will have to sit there and take them because we aren't able to legally publically share the info required so we can handle response to attacks as a community.
The multimillionaires and frequently, billionaires of the Hollywood cartel have shown no such reluctance, and MS learned from the antitrust case that buying politicians to represent their interests is a good investment.
While you are actually correct about our community's need for representation, it has demonstrated that nobody in a position to pay the price of freedom while it still can be paid in dollars gives a flying fuck. And so, soon, the freedom to use the computers we paid for as we see fit instead of the way our corporate masters want them to be used is going to vanish. History will say that our freedom vanished without a fight. Correctly.
Our "geek-activism" as represented by the EFF and Public Knowledge is basically meaningless in this context. This kind of fight is one that non-profit organizations can not effectively participate in regardless of funding level simply because it is illegal for non-profit organizations to contribute to political campaigns. This kind of fight can not be won without our community buying its own politicians.
It's already too late for the US high-tech community to win this kind of fight, even if the money became available now, it's unlikely that the FEC and state election committee filing deadlines can be complied with in order to allow a high-tech community PAC to raise and spend money on/for/against candidates in time for Election Day 2004.
So, if you want freedom of computing. . . time to start shopping for a new country to live in.
"People always get the kind of local government they deserve"
E.E."Doc"Smith
The only people in our community in a position to act chose to do nothing.
The infrastructure can also be used to build powersats relatively cheaply. Would the Third World benefit from being able to buy power cheaper than they can get it in the form of oil from the Arabs? Would we? The other obvious point is that the sun isn't running out of juice anytime soon, which is something we can't say about oil.
That's just the beginning. Space elevators can throw the whole Solar System open to industrial exploitation.
Of course, the main factor here that helped is that the positions of the MEPs were not formulated to win campaign contributions from lobbyists.
In the "land of democracy", the chances that a handful of people can actually get people to listen without massive campaign budgets are a lot smaller.
As I've said, though the EU has done some very wrongheaded things with respect to legislation and technology, the odds on getting them to stop doing them may be considerably better than in the USA if individuals will organize and put in their time and individual-scale money to . . . do something. The war isn't lost there yet. Perhaps it won't be.
The one point that I think based on the article didn't get made as strongly as it should be is that NOT passing software patent bills gives the EU an advantage the USA with respect to individual and small business contributions to technology of the sort that leads to businesses that provides jobs and that the EU can tax.
Remember that the committments of legislators to follow the lead of the US aren't as strong as that of US legislators who got campaign contribution from interested multinationals, i.e. except for a few, I'd guess that a great many are willing to listen to reason if the reason is put in terms that they can understand.
Props to the people who lobbied on behalf of us all.
It'll explain, for instance, how Fritz Hollings got drafted into helping a Hollywood cartel over 3000 miles against the interests of the people who elected him.
There are governments which have declared the existence of ethnic groups illegal. (I'm thinking about Africa) Can mass murder be made moral by making it legal?
As for this being a democracy. . . all people are created equal, but in the transition between democracy and regime, some are much more equal than others.
Donate millions to a major political party and/or its elected public officials and like the *AA organizations, you become much more equal.
The ability to buy a law doesn't make disobeying it illegal.
Quote from the paper: For this reason it is effectively impossible to sanitise storage locations by simple overwriting them, no matter how many overwrite passes are made or what data patterns are written. However by using the relatively simple methods presented in this paper the task of an attacker can be made significantly more difficult, if not prohibitively expensive."
The program I use in Windoze to erase/overwrite files does 30 passes according to the principles set forth in the paper. If I were storing really sensitive info on it, I'd do as the Department of Defense does and physically destroy the media.
If you ever have to handle confidential information, depend on the info in the paper I linked to, not your guesses. This isn't a matter of research that needs to be done, this is work that was done years ago by people really motivated to find out the right answers.
Now, I've got to get an update for the program, which is oddly enough, called Eraser. Wish there were a Linux port.
Are you employed by the subcontractor that forgot to wipe the hard drives in the article the posting was based on?
It's a shame you got modded down to troll, there isn't a lot here with any sort of insights into the guy deeper than his media image.
Telecommunications has already made a big difference to Third World lifestyles. Video-based (television, etc.) lessons in sanitation, farming techniques, first aid, etc. result in healthier, better fed people who need less medical care.
In an area with few doctors and medical facilities, paramedics with telecommunications-based access to superior medical expertise can make a very large difference to people's health. A solution where the US can provide satellite-based communications and the Ethiopians only have to pay for low-cost terminal uplinks that can be put in remote areas is something the Ethiopians might be able to afford.
There have been several articles posted in slashdot where people posting from the Third World tell us about the things people can do who have access to telecommunications that have made the lives of peasants better. In the face of smug, superior people who think they can tell the poor what they really need.
One other thing. If you want to know why a lot of the poor all over the world hate the USA. . . look in the mirror.
We know powersats can be built (solar cells work well in vacuum, we know how to build microwave energy transfer systems, the rest is detail), which is something we do *NOT* know about hydrogen fusion power plants.
Alternative and renewable energy sources and conservation at best stretch out the time we've got to find a better solution than fossil fuels.
While they might be willing to lose a few megabucks on promoting their legal agenda, anybody who is willing to trash a movie's ability to at least make it's costs back in order to make a legal point is going to get his ass fired. You don't make friends in Hollywood by losing $50 or $100M of somebody else's money.
The movie industry is just as evil as the record industry, but not nearly as stupid.
Through a combination of intelligent design, lucky accident and the good sense to follow the consumer's lead, movie companies settled on the VHS video format for 25 years before gently introducing a DVD alternative.
Try lucky accident. Jack Valenti of the MPAA is the guy who said that home taping would kill the movie industry when he was trying to get Congress to stop it. If they'd had their way, there would have been no VHS.
The main difference between the MPAA and RIAA is that the MPAA companies had sense enough to pick a lower price point and add extra content over and above the movie.
Why is the MPAA fighting alongside the RIAA to kill filesharing?
P2P pirating of movies simply isn't economically significant. The bandwidth to the home just isn't there yet and isn't going to be as ubiquitous as the TV for years and years.
So what's the problem?
Same as the RIAA, it's about control. When those broadband pipes to the home are in place, it'll be possible for the next Steven Spielberg to make a movie on his desktop with capabilities better than the best high-end Hollywood has to offer now, rendering and special effects courtesy of a closet full of PCs loaded with high-end programmable video cards... and consumers will be able to download it.
Where is Hollywood in this picture?
For them, that's the problem.
So they're willing to go along with the RIAA on proposals that'll turn the Net into a controlled domain where the only audio/video entertainment content available for public distribution will be "blessed" by Hollywood.
Why is the RIAA out there all by itself suing 12 year olds?
It seems that the RIAA is being the "bad guy" to the MPAA "good guy", and this makes no sense. Gangs of scumbuckets don't make sacrifies for each other unless there's benefit in store for them.
The problem is that it is being used as intended. It's just that the public and Congress were lied to as to what the intended effects are. I never believed that the PATRIOT Act was intended to stop terrorism.