Well, there's Verizon's FiOS fiber service, which can give you 15Mbps down and 2Mbps up for $50/month. (You can also get 30/5, IIRC, but it costs significantly more.) It's not quite Japan's 50Mbps, but it's still pretty good.
I suspect that the 50Mbps service in Japan is available mostly in cities, though, not in rural areas. Much of Japan's population is concentrated in a few cities -- according to statistics I heard from a Japanese tour guide last year, about 10% of the entire population lives in Tokyo -- so wiring up a relatively small geographic area can serve quite a lot of people. In the US we're more spread-out, so deploying broadband service is more expensive for the telcos.
There's a difference between an AACS key in the hands of someone who's authorized (by the AACS LA) to have it, such as a manufacturer of HD-DVD players, and that same key in the hands of someone who is not. Just as in innocuous crowbar -- a perfectly legitimate carpentry tool -- can become a break-in tool when wielded by a burglar, an AACS processing key becomes a circumvention device when it's distributed around the Internet like this one has been.
People are distributing the key specifically because it can be used to circumvent AACS. Even though not everyone distributing the key actually intends to copy HD-DVDs, the fact that it can be used that way is the only reason why people care about it. If it was just an arbitrary random number with no relationship to AACS, nobody would have been motivated to post it all over Digg and in Slashdot tags. This satisfies point 1.
The key has no significant use aside from circumventing AACS. Sure, it's a number, and numbers can be used for a variety of purposes, but this particular number has absolutely no significance over any other arbitrary 128-bit number, except for the fact that it's an AACS processing key. Nobody has any significant reason to need this particular number, unless they're either trying to circumvent AACS, or trying to provide others with a way to circumvent AACS. (The latter case covers the people who were posting the key on Digg claiming it's their WEP key, or posting images whose color values are the key, or posting useless assembly programs whose corresponding machine code is the key, and so on. It's pretty clear that their intent was just to distribute the key.) This covers point 2.
Marketing doesn't necessarily mean selling; it just means making the public aware of something. Posting the AACS key on a public website, together with noting the fact that it is the AACS key, and not just some random number, counts as marketing it. This satisfies point 3.
I don't think your CPU example applies because general-purpose CPUs aren't built specifically for circumventing copy-protection, and they have lots and lots of legitimate uses. If you sold a Pentium chip on eBay and wrote in your listing that "you can run BackupHD-DVD on this!", I doubt you'd fall afoul of the DMCA because you'd satisfy point 3 but not 1 or 2.
IANAL either, but I've read enough about copyright issues that I'm familiar with the basics of copyright law. Laws can generally be understood (to at least a moderate extent) by a combination of logical thinking and common sense, and as a software engineer I find that my skills in reading and understanding computer source code carries over to reading legalese as well.
But I don't really think the key itself could reasonably qualify as software, and I think the DMCA is very specific about banning software that undoes copy protection
Actually, it isn't. What it actually says is:
No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
(Emphasis mine.) I think the AACS LA could easily argue that the processing key is at the very least a "part thereof".
Clearly the White House should launch a "No Department Left Behind" initiative to improve the government's IT security grades.
It could begin with routine penetration testing to assess how well-defended systems are against known and common attacks -- one could call this "standardized testing" to establish a minimum level of security, with budget cuts for departments that fail to keep their networks secure. The results should be reported to the taxpayers, so that we know which systems are secure and which are not, and can put public pressure on departments that aren't keeping their grades up. And of course, all IT managers should have MCSE, CCNA, RHCE, and A+ certifications, to prove that they're qualified for their jobs.
Summing ASCII character values is a very poor way to generate a crypto key from a passphrase, and adding a big fixed constant to the result does not help at all. Only the low bits of the key will vary, and all the others will be the same every time since the sum isn't large enough to affect them, so brute-force attacks (trying every possible key) are very easy. Furthermore collisions are easy to find -- for example, "abc" would produce the same key as "bbb".
This sort of thing is what cryptographic hash functions, such as SHA-256, are for.
(This device didn't actually do any encryption, btw.)
Re:Guess what I'm not buying anytime soon?
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AMD's New DRM
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This has nothing to do with enabling AMD or anyone else to spy on what's on your monitor. It's just to prevent you, the user, from taking unauthorized screenshots while copyrighted content is being displayed.
I could nitpick technical issues like how they use C++ and how compiled object oriented languages totally destroy CPU branch prediction and C++ itself adds tons of vague linkage and excess symbols
Dynamic binding defeats CPU branch prediction regardless of how it's implemented -- if the target of a jump instruction is taken from a pointer whose value is determined at run-time, rather than compiled into the program, it can't be predicted. Ordinary C structures containing function pointers, like GNOME uses, work the same way. This isn't a problem with C++ virtual functions; it's just that current processors aren't able to accelerate a certain technique that's often used in modern software design.
As for the extraneous symbols, GCC 4.0 introduced some facilities for suppressing them, and I'm pretty sure KDE uses them now, so that should no longer be an issue.
My only real issue with KDE's programming environment is that they don't use standard C++; they use a variant of C++ that's "enhanced" with syntactic support for signals and slots, and the code gets preprocessed into standard C++ at build time. That's a bit ugly.
WindowMaker is a window manager, not a desktop environment. A desktop environment consists of a window manager and related UI items, plus (more importantly) a development platform for applications.
For your own personal buying decisions, yes, you can choose any product you want, for any reason you like. But governments can't do that, because they're spending taxpayers' money for the purpose of serving the public. They're obligated to make the choice that's best for the public, and they use a very formalized and open evaluation process so that anyone can verify that the choice was, objectively, the best one for the public.
Anyway, AIGLX is preferred over XGL because it's a cleaner and more elegant solution to the problem, not because it's "easier to build the future 3D desktops" -- Compiz and Beryl can run on both XGL and AIGLX, in fact. However, AIGLX required modifications to the video drivers, and ATi and nVidia took some time in making the necessary changes. That's why XGL caught on initially: because unlike AIGLX it worked on mainstream 3D cards. (These days, nVidia's current drivers support AIGLX, and ATi either recently added support or will be adding support soon, I believe.)
Without commenting on your other four points, I'm curious what you have against X.
It's not perfect, of course. I think it'd be nice if XOrg had a programmatic API for configuring it, rather than just a text file called "xorg.conf", and I've heard some rumors that some work in this direction might be slated for version 7.3.
But for its primary function of displaying graphics on the screen, and receiving keyboard and mouse input, it seems to do just fine. Why does it need to "go crawl off and die"?
A well configured NAT functions as a firewall for inbound connections (in effect). A poorly configured NAT functions as a firewall for inbound connections (in effect).
In other words, a NAT functions as a firewall for inbound connections, whether you want it to or not.
I'd love to have every node on my home LAN directly addressable from the Internet. Not necessarily directly accessible -- I'd use a firewall to block some of them -- but addressable so that by configuring the firewall I can make them accessible if I want to. Unfortunately, I can't, because my broadband ISP (currently Comcast, soon to be Verizon FiOS) only gives me one IP address, so I'm forced to use NAT.
No - NAT is a tool for the job, and so is a firewall.
For restricting connections, a firewall is the right tool for the job. That is exactly what firewalls are meant for.
For translating one address range to another, a NAT is the right tool for the job. If one of the address ranges is private, the NAT has the side effect of preventing incoming connections, but it's not actually designed for that purpose, and it's not the most appropriate tool for the job. It's sufficient, in most cases, but a firewall is preferable.
Evil is merely the absence of God in the world/someone's life. God did not create evil as you suggest. He created good. He is good. Evil/sin/flaws are nothing but the opposite of God. But He lets evil/sin/flaws exist so that free will can also exist.
I understand your analogy, but I don't think it answers the question at hand: if God created the universe and deliberately chose to leave "absence of God" in parts of it, then how can followers of God say that this intentional "absence of God" is sin, an offense against God that must be corrected?
I think about "free will" in a different sense than you do. I believe that the universe is completely deterministic -- it's governed entirely by a comprehensive and consistent set of mathematical rules, some of which we know as the "laws of physics" but most of which we haven't discovered yet -- and the state of the universe at any instant in time is determined completely, and predictably, by the state of the universe at the previous instant in time. Nothing is truly random; things that appear random are merely unpredictable to us humans because we lack the information that would allow us to predict them.
(Note that the above is hinted at by our current scientific knowledge, but not actually proven; it'll be a very long time before it's scientifically proven, if that's even possible. I take it on faith, as you take your religion on faith, because it makes rational sense to me.)
Under this view, there's some overlap between the concepts of "fate" and "free will". If I ask you to choose a random number, you'll choose a number that you feel is random because you can't think of any particular reason why you chose it, but if you were put in the same situation again -- exactly the same situation, including the temperature of the air around you, what you ate for breakfast, the phase of the moon, and the weather in Tokyo yesterday -- the complete state of the entire universe -- you would choose that same number again. And an omniscient observer could've predicted your "random" choice, since it's really just the logical consequence of all the other events that have happened in the universe since the dawn of time.
Therefore, if an omniscient being created the universe, he did so, as I said earlier, with full knowledge of where it would lead. It wasn't just "let's make a garden called Eden and see what happens"; if God deliberately created the world then he knowingly and deliberately created every event in history, both good and bad. Here as participants in the universe, we feel that we have free will, but to a God watching from outside the universe -- the "omniscient observer" I mentioned above -- there is no such thing as free will, because everything is completely predictable.
Since I believe the universe is deterministic, governed entirely by cause and effect, it follows that I believe there's no supreme being involved in the day-to-day workings of the universe, causing events to occur and causing people to feel or think certain things. The universe runs itself like clockwork. (I have no opinion on whether there might be a supreme being who created the universe but has left it untouched since then, because I think that's irrelevant.)
From the objective viewpoint of the universe as a whole, nothing that people do here on Earth is "good" or "evil" because everything is simply working as it should, following the natural flow of cause and effect. From the subjective viewpoint of myself as a human being, some things are "good" and others are "evil" because we want ourselves, and our species, to survive, and we judge things in accordance to how well they further that goal. But "good" and "evil" are not imposed onto us from "on high"; the Earth, humanity, and our struggles are no more significant to the universe than a particular ripple in the ocean is to us. We're just patterns in a very complex mathematical function.
I agree, people have flaws. Your example of a "pretty bad" flaw is a non-example since you left it blank, but I can think of a few: murderous tendencies, compulsive lying, pedophilia, bigotry, and greed. Supreme being aside, traits like these are bad because they're detrimental to society and the survival of the human race.
However, if "God" -- who is said to be omnipotent and omniscient -- created the universe and everyone in it, then he created the people with these flaws. If God is omniscient, it stands to reason that he must have known, at creation, that the proverbial Eve would eat the proverbial apple, and if he is omnipotent, he could just as easily have created the universe in such a way that she would not. If God is omniscient, he must have known that eventually a man named Hitler would put millions of his followers to death, and that later, a number of his priests would be convicted for sexually exploiting children. To us humans, free will means that the future is a mystery, but not to an all-knowing divine being who can see the entire chain of cause and effect, all the way down to the interactions of every subatomic particle, from creation to eternity. If a God created the universe, he did so with full knowledge of where it would lead.
How can the aforementioned traits be considered flaws if a flawless God knowingly and deliberately created them?
I believe that right and wrong are defined by society itself, motivated by the common need for survival of the species. I believe that the aforementioned traits are flaws, regardless of whether they were created or not, because they go against our basic need for humanity to survive, and are therefore considered wrong by most people. I can tell right from wrong without need for Commandments or tales of eternal punishment, because I learned the Golden Rule from my parents at a young age and that suffices quite well.
I believe that if belief and "faith in someone infinitely greater than yourself who has no weakness" helps a person to overcome his or her weaknesses and become a better person, this is a good thing, but that such a being does not actually exist and that faith is not the only way to overcome one's faults. Personally, I'm motivated to do what's right because it gains respect from my family and friends, and helps to ensure that the remainder of my life will be filled with desirable things like friendship and success, and not undesirable things like jail and vilification.
In short, I'm not opposed to religion, but I am not, myself, religious. Getting back to the point of the post you originally replied to -- someone's claim that people are "hard-wired to adopt a cause that makes believers feel ashamed for existing and requires them to force others into sacrificing their freedoms to live the way the believers want them to" -- I think that's overly pessimistic, but there's a grain of truth in it. Quoting T H Huxley, courtesy of another Slashdot user:
On the contrary, the various religions are, to a great extent, mutually exclusive; and their adherents delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with criminality, deserving and ensuing punishment of infinite severity.
I don't know where you live, but I'm in the US, where our history books tell of a group of pilgrims who traveled to the "New World" on a ship called the Mayflower, seeking freedom from the state-imposed religion in England at the time, and the persecution of those with different beliefs. (This was under King James, btw, after which the King James Bible is named.) It was not the first time in history that this sort of thing had happened.
It is my view that religion itself is OK, but religious groups have a tendency to try to force their beliefs on others, and that is not OK. I can relate to Overly Critical Guy's claim in that regard.
I don't agree with the "God damn you're an idiot" sentiment of the previous respondent, but like that person I do wonder how you get the idea that the true meaning of "freedom" is responsibility to a higher being. It reminds me of the "freedom is slavery" propaganda from Orwell's 1984, though I doubt you meant it that way.
I'd say freedom is simply the ability to live your life as you choose, within a set of generally-accepted constraints imposed by society, such as not murdering and not stealing. You're free to devote your life to serving a higher being (such as through evangelism or by becoming a priest) if you believe in one. You're free to devote your life to a higher purpose (such as protecting endangered species or the advancement of science) if you believe it's a worthy one. You're free to not devote yourself to anything, but simply to live life one day at a time and see where it takes you.
As long as you refrain from doing things that society considers unacceptable, (which mostly means obeying the law), any of these choices is OK. Your (apparent) claim, that people should not be free to choose whether to serve a higher being or not, is worrisome.
If we were "meant to live" in a certain way, why do we not already live in that way? If we were deliberately created, did our creator make a mistake, as human engineers sometimes do, such that we're broken and don't work as intended? Or did our creator merely wish for us to live in a certain way, but deliberately give us the ability to choose not to, and if so, how does this gift of choice relate to your idea of freedom? Alternatively, if we were not deliberately created, but merely evolved by random mutation and natural selection, who "meant" us to live in any particular way?
I worried about that because of the soft case, but my 48 made it through three years of high school and all four years of college with no such damage. The screen is uncracked and unscratched and the calculator still works flawlessly.
Of course people should be allowed to know that Linux has a TPM driver. It's the part where you equate a TPM driver to a draconian DRM system that's FUD.
The way to prevent the spread of draconian DRM systems is to not buy content protected by them, and convince others to not buy it either. Neglecting to support TPM hardware is like sticking your head in the sand: it doesn't make the DRM systems go away. And merely supporting TPM hardware isn't likely to do much to encourage TPM-based DRM systems to appear -- not on Linux, whose users are known to be anti-DRM in general and whose licensing makes it difficult to legally implement such a thing anyway. I can imagine TPM support in Windows having an effect here, but I really don't think the RIAA and MPAA are choosing DRM schemes based on whether they work in Linux.
It's not evil to have support for a piece of hardware when lack of support for the hardware would do nothing to solve the problem of content being locked up in DRM systems.
The potential for TPM-based DRM systems doesn't exist in Windows and OSX? What are you talking about?
My ThinkPad Z60m contains a TPM chip, and it came with Windows XP preinstalled. I'm not a Mac user, but I've heard that some of the new Macs have TPMs too. You think they'd include the hardware if it was impossible for the shipped OS to use it?
Linux "contains the technology for DRM which puts anything iTunes can do to shame" in the same sense that Linux contains the technology to release worms onto the Internet or launch nuclear missiles -- since, after all, it has hardware drivers for Ethernet cards (for releasing worms) and serial ports (which are a likely candidate for a missile launcher's interface to its control system). A hardware driver is not evil just because it's possible to write software that does bad things with it.
Your argument that TPM support is almost as bad as a DRM system because strong DRM depends on a TPM is a complete fallacy. Counterexample: bludgeoning someone to death requires a heavy object such as a baseball bat, but owning a baseball bat is not "almost as bad as" murdering someone.
...which is a piece of hardware that does absolutely nothing by itself. You sound like you're trying to say, in a "'nuff said" sort of way, that there's DRM in the Linux kernel. There isn't.
(To nitpickers: yes, there's a subsystem in Linux called "DRM". It's the Direct Rendering Manager used for accelerated 3D graphics. It has nothing to do with Digital Rights Management.)
TPM hardware is not inherently evil. It has beneficial uses too, such as full-disk encryption that doesn't require you to type a decryption key at boot time. (Allow access to the system's standard kernel, which presumably is not backdoored, but deny access to any other kernel that an attacker might try to boot.) DRM systems are evil and DRM systems can utilize a TPM chip, but merely having a driver for a TPM chip is not a problem.
Older versions of the ipw2200 driver had a bug that broke WPA support when using NetworkManager, even though it worked fine if you were to use wpasupplicant directly. That bug has now been fixed, though, so give it a try with the current version of Ubuntu.
I had written a nice response to each of your five points, but then got my tabs mixed up while researching VLC and accidentally closed it and lost what I wrote. So now I'll just respond to the VLC issue.
You mentioned that MPlayer worked well using "actual Windows codecs", and that's the key. WMV is a Microsoft-proprietary format and the only good decoder implementation is Microsoft's own. VLC on Linux uses a different implementation (part of ffmpeg) which is described as "pre-beta" on VLC's own features page.
VLC works well on Windows because it uses DirectShow, which is a multimedia framework provided by Windows, and DirectShow uses Microsoft's WMV codec for playing WMV files. GNOME has a similar multimedia framework, called GStreamer, and there's a plugin called "pitfdll" that lets it load DirectShow codecs. So with pitfdll, you could use Totem (GNOME's native video player, with a nice GUI) to watch that Halo trailer using the same Windows codec that you used successfully with MPlayer.
Unfortunately, since the use of Windows codecs in Linux is illegal in most countries for copyright reasons, these things aren't likely to be enabled out-of-the-box in Ubuntu anytime soon. People will install them anyway, just like they install the DVD codecs which are also illegal in some countries, but jumping through those hoops is the cost of watching video in a proprietary format, and that doesn't seem likely to change.
You do realize that SGI is the company that invented OpenGL, right? This isn't some newcomer to the graphics market — they've been around longer than ATI and nVidia.
That's only a partial proof, but I see your point.
It might help if the polling place were to have a screen that displays randomly-selected votes (ID and candidate) in real time as they're cast. That way the number reported by the voter could just as easily be that of someone else's vote for the "required" candidate that just happened to show up on the screen.
That's adding more complexity, though, and more potential weak links for someone to exploit. (For example, an attacker could cause bogus votes to show up on that screen, to catch the voter if he reports one of the bogus vote numbers.)
You can avoid that by just telling each voter his or her "vote ID" number, rather than providing an official printed slip or something. In an electronic system, just display it on the screen; the voter can choose to write it down or not.
After the election you publish the list of vote ID numbers and corresponding votes somewhere -- on the web, with printed copies available in the county courthouse or something -- so a voter who knows his own vote ID can confirm his vote. But the voter cannot prove to a third party that a particular vote ID is really his own, so vote-selling doesn't work.
Ideally the ID numbers should be chosen randomly, rather than sequentially, so that they don't reveal anything about when (and possibly where) they were cast.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's Verizon's FiOS fiber service, which can give you 15Mbps down and 2Mbps up for $50/month. (You can also get 30/5, IIRC, but it costs significantly more.) It's not quite Japan's 50Mbps, but it's still pretty good.
I suspect that the 50Mbps service in Japan is available mostly in cities, though, not in rural areas. Much of Japan's population is concentrated in a few cities -- according to statistics I heard from a Japanese tour guide last year, about 10% of the entire population lives in Tokyo -- so wiring up a relatively small geographic area can serve quite a lot of people. In the US we're more spread-out, so deploying broadband service is more expensive for the telcos.
There's a difference between an AACS key in the hands of someone who's authorized (by the AACS LA) to have it, such as a manufacturer of HD-DVD players, and that same key in the hands of someone who is not. Just as in innocuous crowbar -- a perfectly legitimate carpentry tool -- can become a break-in tool when wielded by a burglar, an AACS processing key becomes a circumvention device when it's distributed around the Internet like this one has been.
I don't think your CPU example applies because general-purpose CPUs aren't built specifically for circumventing copy-protection, and they have lots and lots of legitimate uses. If you sold a Pentium chip on eBay and wrote in your listing that "you can run BackupHD-DVD on this!", I doubt you'd fall afoul of the DMCA because you'd satisfy point 3 but not 1 or 2.
IANAL either, but I've read enough about copyright issues that I'm familiar with the basics of copyright law. Laws can generally be understood (to at least a moderate extent) by a combination of logical thinking and common sense, and as a software engineer I find that my skills in reading and understanding computer source code carries over to reading legalese as well.
Actually, it isn't. What it actually says is:
(Emphasis mine.) I think the AACS LA could easily argue that the processing key is at the very least a "part thereof".
Clearly the White House should launch a "No Department Left Behind" initiative to improve the government's IT security grades.
It could begin with routine penetration testing to assess how well-defended systems are against known and common attacks -- one could call this "standardized testing" to establish a minimum level of security, with budget cuts for departments that fail to keep their networks secure. The results should be reported to the taxpayers, so that we know which systems are secure and which are not, and can put public pressure on departments that aren't keeping their grades up. And of course, all IT managers should have MCSE, CCNA, RHCE, and A+ certifications, to prove that they're qualified for their jobs.
Summing ASCII character values is a very poor way to generate a crypto key from a passphrase, and adding a big fixed constant to the result does not help at all. Only the low bits of the key will vary, and all the others will be the same every time since the sum isn't large enough to affect them, so brute-force attacks (trying every possible key) are very easy. Furthermore collisions are easy to find -- for example, "abc" would produce the same key as "bbb".
This sort of thing is what cryptographic hash functions, such as SHA-256, are for.
(This device didn't actually do any encryption, btw.)
This has nothing to do with enabling AMD or anyone else to spy on what's on your monitor. It's just to prevent you, the user, from taking unauthorized screenshots while copyrighted content is being displayed.
Dynamic binding defeats CPU branch prediction regardless of how it's implemented -- if the target of a jump instruction is taken from a pointer whose value is determined at run-time, rather than compiled into the program, it can't be predicted. Ordinary C structures containing function pointers, like GNOME uses, work the same way. This isn't a problem with C++ virtual functions; it's just that current processors aren't able to accelerate a certain technique that's often used in modern software design.
As for the extraneous symbols, GCC 4.0 introduced some facilities for suppressing them, and I'm pretty sure KDE uses them now, so that should no longer be an issue.
My only real issue with KDE's programming environment is that they don't use standard C++; they use a variant of C++ that's "enhanced" with syntactic support for signals and slots, and the code gets preprocessed into standard C++ at build time. That's a bit ugly.
WindowMaker is a window manager, not a desktop environment. A desktop environment consists of a window manager and related UI items, plus (more importantly) a development platform for applications.
For your own personal buying decisions, yes, you can choose any product you want, for any reason you like. But governments can't do that, because they're spending taxpayers' money for the purpose of serving the public. They're obligated to make the choice that's best for the public, and they use a very formalized and open evaluation process so that anyone can verify that the choice was, objectively, the best one for the public.
It's AIGLX, actually, not AIGXL.
Anyway, AIGLX is preferred over XGL because it's a cleaner and more elegant solution to the problem, not because it's "easier to build the future 3D desktops" -- Compiz and Beryl can run on both XGL and AIGLX, in fact. However, AIGLX required modifications to the video drivers, and ATi and nVidia took some time in making the necessary changes. That's why XGL caught on initially: because unlike AIGLX it worked on mainstream 3D cards. (These days, nVidia's current drivers support AIGLX, and ATi either recently added support or will be adding support soon, I believe.)
Without commenting on your other four points, I'm curious what you have against X.
It's not perfect, of course. I think it'd be nice if XOrg had a programmatic API for configuring it, rather than just a text file called "xorg.conf", and I've heard some rumors that some work in this direction might be slated for version 7.3.
But for its primary function of displaying graphics on the screen, and receiving keyboard and mouse input, it seems to do just fine. Why does it need to "go crawl off and die"?
In other words, a NAT functions as a firewall for inbound connections, whether you want it to or not.
I'd love to have every node on my home LAN directly addressable from the Internet. Not necessarily directly accessible -- I'd use a firewall to block some of them -- but addressable so that by configuring the firewall I can make them accessible if I want to. Unfortunately, I can't, because my broadband ISP (currently Comcast, soon to be Verizon FiOS) only gives me one IP address, so I'm forced to use NAT.
For restricting connections, a firewall is the right tool for the job. That is exactly what firewalls are meant for.
For translating one address range to another, a NAT is the right tool for the job. If one of the address ranges is private, the NAT has the side effect of preventing incoming connections, but it's not actually designed for that purpose, and it's not the most appropriate tool for the job. It's sufficient, in most cases, but a firewall is preferable.
I understand your analogy, but I don't think it answers the question at hand: if God created the universe and deliberately chose to leave "absence of God" in parts of it, then how can followers of God say that this intentional "absence of God" is sin, an offense against God that must be corrected?
I think about "free will" in a different sense than you do. I believe that the universe is completely deterministic -- it's governed entirely by a comprehensive and consistent set of mathematical rules, some of which we know as the "laws of physics" but most of which we haven't discovered yet -- and the state of the universe at any instant in time is determined completely, and predictably, by the state of the universe at the previous instant in time. Nothing is truly random; things that appear random are merely unpredictable to us humans because we lack the information that would allow us to predict them.
(Note that the above is hinted at by our current scientific knowledge, but not actually proven; it'll be a very long time before it's scientifically proven, if that's even possible. I take it on faith, as you take your religion on faith, because it makes rational sense to me.)
Under this view, there's some overlap between the concepts of "fate" and "free will". If I ask you to choose a random number, you'll choose a number that you feel is random because you can't think of any particular reason why you chose it, but if you were put in the same situation again -- exactly the same situation, including the temperature of the air around you, what you ate for breakfast, the phase of the moon, and the weather in Tokyo yesterday -- the complete state of the entire universe -- you would choose that same number again. And an omniscient observer could've predicted your "random" choice, since it's really just the logical consequence of all the other events that have happened in the universe since the dawn of time.
Therefore, if an omniscient being created the universe, he did so, as I said earlier, with full knowledge of where it would lead. It wasn't just "let's make a garden called Eden and see what happens"; if God deliberately created the world then he knowingly and deliberately created every event in history, both good and bad. Here as participants in the universe, we feel that we have free will, but to a God watching from outside the universe -- the "omniscient observer" I mentioned above -- there is no such thing as free will, because everything is completely predictable.
Since I believe the universe is deterministic, governed entirely by cause and effect, it follows that I believe there's no supreme being involved in the day-to-day workings of the universe, causing events to occur and causing people to feel or think certain things. The universe runs itself like clockwork. (I have no opinion on whether there might be a supreme being who created the universe but has left it untouched since then, because I think that's irrelevant.)
From the objective viewpoint of the universe as a whole, nothing that people do here on Earth is "good" or "evil" because everything is simply working as it should, following the natural flow of cause and effect. From the subjective viewpoint of myself as a human being, some things are "good" and others are "evil" because we want ourselves, and our species, to survive, and we judge things in accordance to how well they further that goal. But "good" and "evil" are not imposed onto us from "on high"; the Earth, humanity, and our struggles are no more significant to the universe than a particular ripple in the ocean is to us. We're just patterns in a very complex mathematical function.
I agree, people have flaws. Your example of a "pretty bad" flaw is a non-example since you left it blank, but I can think of a few: murderous tendencies, compulsive lying, pedophilia, bigotry, and greed. Supreme being aside, traits like these are bad because they're detrimental to society and the survival of the human race.
However, if "God" -- who is said to be omnipotent and omniscient -- created the universe and everyone in it, then he created the people with these flaws. If God is omniscient, it stands to reason that he must have known, at creation, that the proverbial Eve would eat the proverbial apple, and if he is omnipotent, he could just as easily have created the universe in such a way that she would not. If God is omniscient, he must have known that eventually a man named Hitler would put millions of his followers to death, and that later, a number of his priests would be convicted for sexually exploiting children. To us humans, free will means that the future is a mystery, but not to an all-knowing divine being who can see the entire chain of cause and effect, all the way down to the interactions of every subatomic particle, from creation to eternity. If a God created the universe, he did so with full knowledge of where it would lead.
How can the aforementioned traits be considered flaws if a flawless God knowingly and deliberately created them?
I believe that right and wrong are defined by society itself, motivated by the common need for survival of the species. I believe that the aforementioned traits are flaws, regardless of whether they were created or not, because they go against our basic need for humanity to survive, and are therefore considered wrong by most people. I can tell right from wrong without need for Commandments or tales of eternal punishment, because I learned the Golden Rule from my parents at a young age and that suffices quite well.
I believe that if belief and "faith in someone infinitely greater than yourself who has no weakness" helps a person to overcome his or her weaknesses and become a better person, this is a good thing, but that such a being does not actually exist and that faith is not the only way to overcome one's faults. Personally, I'm motivated to do what's right because it gains respect from my family and friends, and helps to ensure that the remainder of my life will be filled with desirable things like friendship and success, and not undesirable things like jail and vilification.
In short, I'm not opposed to religion, but I am not, myself, religious. Getting back to the point of the post you originally replied to -- someone's claim that people are "hard-wired to adopt a cause that makes believers feel ashamed for existing and requires them to force others into sacrificing their freedoms to live the way the believers want them to" -- I think that's overly pessimistic, but there's a grain of truth in it. Quoting T H Huxley, courtesy of another Slashdot user:
I don't know where you live, but I'm in the US, where our history books tell of a group of pilgrims who traveled to the "New World" on a ship called the Mayflower, seeking freedom from the state-imposed religion in England at the time, and the persecution of those with different beliefs. (This was under King James, btw, after which the King James Bible is named.) It was not the first time in history that this sort of thing had happened.
It is my view that religion itself is OK, but religious groups have a tendency to try to force their beliefs on others, and that is not OK. I can relate to Overly Critical Guy's claim in that regard.
I don't agree with the "God damn you're an idiot" sentiment of the previous respondent, but like that person I do wonder how you get the idea that the true meaning of "freedom" is responsibility to a higher being. It reminds me of the "freedom is slavery" propaganda from Orwell's 1984, though I doubt you meant it that way.
I'd say freedom is simply the ability to live your life as you choose, within a set of generally-accepted constraints imposed by society, such as not murdering and not stealing. You're free to devote your life to serving a higher being (such as through evangelism or by becoming a priest) if you believe in one. You're free to devote your life to a higher purpose (such as protecting endangered species or the advancement of science) if you believe it's a worthy one. You're free to not devote yourself to anything, but simply to live life one day at a time and see where it takes you.
As long as you refrain from doing things that society considers unacceptable, (which mostly means obeying the law), any of these choices is OK. Your (apparent) claim, that people should not be free to choose whether to serve a higher being or not, is worrisome.
If we were "meant to live" in a certain way, why do we not already live in that way? If we were deliberately created, did our creator make a mistake, as human engineers sometimes do, such that we're broken and don't work as intended? Or did our creator merely wish for us to live in a certain way, but deliberately give us the ability to choose not to, and if so, how does this gift of choice relate to your idea of freedom? Alternatively, if we were not deliberately created, but merely evolved by random mutation and natural selection, who "meant" us to live in any particular way?
I worried about that because of the soft case, but my 48 made it through three years of high school and all four years of college with no such damage. The screen is uncracked and unscratched and the calculator still works flawlessly.
Of course people should be allowed to know that Linux has a TPM driver. It's the part where you equate a TPM driver to a draconian DRM system that's FUD.
The way to prevent the spread of draconian DRM systems is to not buy content protected by them, and convince others to not buy it either. Neglecting to support TPM hardware is like sticking your head in the sand: it doesn't make the DRM systems go away. And merely supporting TPM hardware isn't likely to do much to encourage TPM-based DRM systems to appear -- not on Linux, whose users are known to be anti-DRM in general and whose licensing makes it difficult to legally implement such a thing anyway. I can imagine TPM support in Windows having an effect here, but I really don't think the RIAA and MPAA are choosing DRM schemes based on whether they work in Linux.
It's not evil to have support for a piece of hardware when lack of support for the hardware would do nothing to solve the problem of content being locked up in DRM systems.
The potential for TPM-based DRM systems doesn't exist in Windows and OSX? What are you talking about?
My ThinkPad Z60m contains a TPM chip, and it came with Windows XP preinstalled. I'm not a Mac user, but I've heard that some of the new Macs have TPMs too. You think they'd include the hardware if it was impossible for the shipped OS to use it?
Linux "contains the technology for DRM which puts anything iTunes can do to shame" in the same sense that Linux contains the technology to release worms onto the Internet or launch nuclear missiles -- since, after all, it has hardware drivers for Ethernet cards (for releasing worms) and serial ports (which are a likely candidate for a missile launcher's interface to its control system). A hardware driver is not evil just because it's possible to write software that does bad things with it.
Your argument that TPM support is almost as bad as a DRM system because strong DRM depends on a TPM is a complete fallacy. Counterexample: bludgeoning someone to death requires a heavy object such as a baseball bat, but owning a baseball bat is not "almost as bad as" murdering someone.
Please, stop the FUD.
...which is a piece of hardware that does absolutely nothing by itself. You sound like you're trying to say, in a "'nuff said" sort of way, that there's DRM in the Linux kernel. There isn't.
(To nitpickers: yes, there's a subsystem in Linux called "DRM". It's the Direct Rendering Manager used for accelerated 3D graphics. It has nothing to do with Digital Rights Management.)
TPM hardware is not inherently evil. It has beneficial uses too, such as full-disk encryption that doesn't require you to type a decryption key at boot time. (Allow access to the system's standard kernel, which presumably is not backdoored, but deny access to any other kernel that an attacker might try to boot.) DRM systems are evil and DRM systems can utilize a TPM chip, but merely having a driver for a TPM chip is not a problem.
Older versions of the ipw2200 driver had a bug that broke WPA support when using NetworkManager, even though it worked fine if you were to use wpasupplicant directly. That bug has now been fixed, though, so give it a try with the current version of Ubuntu.
I had written a nice response to each of your five points, but then got my tabs mixed up while researching VLC and accidentally closed it and lost what I wrote. So now I'll just respond to the VLC issue.
You mentioned that MPlayer worked well using "actual Windows codecs", and that's the key. WMV is a Microsoft-proprietary format and the only good decoder implementation is Microsoft's own. VLC on Linux uses a different implementation (part of ffmpeg) which is described as "pre-beta" on VLC's own features page.
VLC works well on Windows because it uses DirectShow, which is a multimedia framework provided by Windows, and DirectShow uses Microsoft's WMV codec for playing WMV files. GNOME has a similar multimedia framework, called GStreamer, and there's a plugin called "pitfdll" that lets it load DirectShow codecs. So with pitfdll, you could use Totem (GNOME's native video player, with a nice GUI) to watch that Halo trailer using the same Windows codec that you used successfully with MPlayer.
Unfortunately, since the use of Windows codecs in Linux is illegal in most countries for copyright reasons, these things aren't likely to be enabled out-of-the-box in Ubuntu anytime soon. People will install them anyway, just like they install the DVD codecs which are also illegal in some countries, but jumping through those hoops is the cost of watching video in a proprietary format, and that doesn't seem likely to change.
You do realize that SGI is the company that invented OpenGL, right? This isn't some newcomer to the graphics market — they've been around longer than ATI and nVidia.
That's only a partial proof, but I see your point.
It might help if the polling place were to have a screen that displays randomly-selected votes (ID and candidate) in real time as they're cast. That way the number reported by the voter could just as easily be that of someone else's vote for the "required" candidate that just happened to show up on the screen.
That's adding more complexity, though, and more potential weak links for someone to exploit. (For example, an attacker could cause bogus votes to show up on that screen, to catch the voter if he reports one of the bogus vote numbers.)
You can avoid that by just telling each voter his or her "vote ID" number, rather than providing an official printed slip or something. In an electronic system, just display it on the screen; the voter can choose to write it down or not.
After the election you publish the list of vote ID numbers and corresponding votes somewhere -- on the web, with printed copies available in the county courthouse or something -- so a voter who knows his own vote ID can confirm his vote. But the voter cannot prove to a third party that a particular vote ID is really his own, so vote-selling doesn't work.
Ideally the ID numbers should be chosen randomly, rather than sequentially, so that they don't reveal anything about when (and possibly where) they were cast.