Exactly right - temporary monopoly is essentially the payment that the public makes to buy public access to "trade secrets", and the payment to authors to release useful works (historically, works that are of purely artistic merit seem to also be considered "useful" in this context) to the public, to be improved upon by the public, after the duration of the monopoly with which the access was paid for. ("To promote the progress of science and the useful arts" - the purpose of patents and copyrights is spelled out pretty plainly in the US Constitution. I'm making the assumption that the purpose is similar in other nations.)
The problem is that we're now paying for complete junk ("OOooo! Rounded corners! That will be an awesome basis for further improvements in 20 years!") in terms of patents, and paying a horrifically, obscenely inflated price (almost a CENTURY in most cases [95 years for "works for hire", which most seem to be these days, or as I recall "70 years after the author/artist dies"]).
One fix I haven't seen discussed is doing away with "flat fee" payment (i.e. a set term for all patents/copyrights) and instead having a panel offer an appropriate monopoly duration based on an estimate of the patent or artistic work's reasonable value - a genuinely plausible and novel cure for multiple cancers that would be useful for developing other cancer cures might be worth more than the standard 20 years worth of patent monopoly, while a typical low-quality "software patent" might be only worth a year or two. Copyright gets a little more difficult because in many cases the "worth" is a matter of subjective artistic merit rather than obvious "usefulness", but one might grant some truly groundbreaking piece of epic art/movie-making/music or an exceptionally useful scientific publication a full century, while a naked-midget-jello-wrestling porn video series' 12th sequel might be "paid" only a year, for example.
When the world wises up and elects me Emperor of the United States, this is but one of the much-needed reforms I'll implement, so make sure you write me in for the position during the next election.
Hey now, there are TWO parties in the US. There's the "Not-Republican Party" and the "Anti-Not-Republican Party". Obviously, they are completely different from each other.
That's only within SAMBA itself - yes, Linux has been able to serve Microsoft Windows clients in SMB2, but can Linux MOUNT an SMB2 share yet (e.g. mount.cifs)?
I haven't tested, but I presume Samba's smbclient tool might be able to handle being an SMB2 client, but that's an awkward substitute for a real filesystem mount.
The decade-long focus on playing nice with Microsoft Windows seems to be getting somewhere, but I haven't seen much about letting Linux play too.
Does CIFS implement SMB2 yet (or is there an "SMB2FS" module that I missed), or is Linux still excluded outside of "smbclient"?
Can SAMBA4's LDAP server also be used for standard basic LDAP authentication as well "e.g. for web servers, minimalistic *nix boxen, etc) or does it still only permit authentication by clients implementing a full "ActiveDirectory®" stack?
Sadly, no - the only thing that's really GPL is the kernel itself. Google has stripped out all of the other "copyleft" (i.e. "share-alike") licensed components that you'd get with a more standard Linux environment and replaced them with stripped-down BSD/Apache dismissively-licensed ("Hey, I'm taking your work and messing with it and squeezing money out of people with it, but not sharing the changes or letting people interoperate, okay?" "Meh, whatever.")* components.
I've noticed that rooted phones often end up swapping GPL components back in, most notably busybox.
* Google doesn't actually approach things this way - they do eventually share their changes for people to experiment freely. They don't HAVE to, though, nor does any third-party corporation who might want to take and use the code. Fortunately an incompatible fork like that which would result is prevented from calling itself "Android" due to trademark restrictions, at least.
Let's see - the Mantle is a hard shell around a liquid core. Marrow is a rich edible substance scraped from inside bones that has a solid or semi-solid consistency but softens when heated (cooked)...
I just had a horrifying thought - excuse me, I need to check the ingredients list on my bag of "M&M's" again...
Not to mention the fact that adding IPv6 addresses hugely dilutes the value of IP addresses - you can't just print more IP addresses without causing hyperinflation! The internet IP economy will COLLAPSE!
That's why I've been switching to doing all my communications with packets made of solid gold. It's a little slower, but no dang socialist government is going to collapse MY packets' value! I'll be the one laughing when you guys have to use like a billion IP addresses just to send one "tweet"!
Maybe I'm weird, but aside from not caring until they hit <$200, the main thing missing from tablets that I might otherwise be interested in is GPS.
If I buy a tablet, I want to be able to use it as a portable map (with better resolution than "you're somewhere within a mile or so of here") and maybe the occasional "augmented reality" application (e.g. Mixare).
That's not ALL I'd want it for, of course, but its lack drops a tablet below my level of interest. Am I the only one?
(And am I mistaken, or would adding GPS add no more than perhaps $2 to the marginal cost of each tablet these days?)
Don't do that to me. You make my brain go strange places.
I'm picturing a security-focussed Linux-based portable computer, that uses the Linux Mint distribution, but only a really stripped-down, bare-minimum installation. Just enough that once you set up the password to log in, you can then run a virtual machine from an encrypted loopback device which actually contains a "full" Linux Mint distribution.
And then you install that setup on one of these...
Kind of off-topic, but I've been wondering if it'd be reasonably easy to set up node.js as a fastcgi provider for cherokee or nginx to send server-side javascript to for processing. That'd give me a simple way to try simple little server-side javascript for learning.
"What about using PHP-CGI on apache without mod_php?"
The performance hit for doing that is pretty bad - any time you hit a.php file the system has to go start up a new PHP interpreter program. (This isn't specifically a PHP thing, plain old-school cgi is the slowest way to run anything that needs an interpreter).
I've gotten quite fond of php-fpm (an "internal" implementation of a fastcgi provider included with PHP), and as a bonus once it's set up, you can switch between cherokee, nginx, apache, lighthttpd, etc, or even some combination of them at the same time as long as they support fastcgi, without needing to do anything else to PHP configuration.
Second this - I've grown to prefer Cherokee (ridiculously easy configuration, as fast as nginx, and 'copylefted' as well), though I have no complaint using nginx as well (I'm using nginx on a virtual server running an Ubuntu release that seemed to be having some trouble with cherokee with php-fpm for reasons I wasn't able to figure out.)
"In our 2 party system it is impossible to lump people together in different categories based on which of the 2 parties you vote for"
I think this is doubly true now that "the two parties" seem to be largely defined by opposition to each other rather than any clear political platform intended to benefit the country and its general citizenry.
These days, "The Democratic Party" doesn't really have a clear platform, as it is really made up more or less of everybody who, regardless of their real political views, doesn't want to be "Republican(tm)" but still wants to be affiliated with a large enough political corporation to have a chance of being allowed to win an election (c.f. "Blue Dog" democrats, and President Barack Obama, who is often accused/praised as a good "moderate Republican president"). In short, they're really only definable these days as "not-Republicans". "The Republican Party", on the other hand, does seem to have a very concise and well-enforced political platform. Unfortunately, that platform is "the opposite of whatever 'The Democrats(tm)' want". They're "The Anti-Democrat Party".
tl;dr: "The Two Parties" are the "Not-Republicans" and the "Anti-Not-Republicans". Also: the US political system is a complete fustercluck, or perhaps just a circus put on by whoever is really running things...
"However I will point out the comparison applies only to versions of these browsers running on Windows 7"
I noticed that - and that some of the "Security Features" they were testing appeared to be specifically whether or not the browser prevented access to a couple of Windows-specific things.
I did skim through the paper and it's actually not too bad - they mention in several places that you can't definitively conflate their analysis with whether or not the browser is really and truly "secure". From skimming, I got the impression (someone who read it in more depth please correct me here) that many of their complaints really amount to Firefox being (arguably) more capable (i.e. you can make it do more things) and their underlying assumption is that "capability=risk".
I would swear that at least some of the security "features" they're talking about actually are already or are in development for Firefox - note that the report is for Firefox 5, which (by the new actually-get-features-out-in-a-timely-fashion development schedule that Mozilla is on) is quite old now, or at least I certainly notice a substantial improvement in responsiveness and stability since then for Firefox on Linux. Firefox 9 is scheduled to switch from "Beta" to "Stable" in the next week or so, I think...
Personally, I'm still sticking with Firefox for now. I keep a copy of Chromium on my system and I use it from time to time, but so far I find myself going back to Firefox for the functionality (not because I hate Chrom(e|ium) or anything). I still suspect they'll drop back down to a "couple of major releases per year" sort of schedule sometime after they've got silent updates working (which I think is scheduled to hit "stable" in January or February of next year if I remember correctly).
To answer your question about Chrome plugins, the one major plugin that I installed was Adblock Plus, which supposedly now can actually prevent downloading of ad "content" rather than merely hiding it after downloading as it used to do. I haven't used it enough to determine if it works as well as Adblock Plus for Firefox, but it seemed to at least be functional.
I seem to be a wierdo in this, but aside from appropriately affordable price, what I'm really waiting for is a tablet like this with GPS so that I can use it as a portable map (among other things).
I want that a lot more than the ability to let people stare at my ugly face over the internet occasionally while I'm using the tablet...
I wonder if Mozilla is trying to get as much done as possible before the risk of losing funding and being forced to fire paid evelopers and slow back down.
"Trespassing" rather than "theft". They're talking about usurpation of a "property"-use right without permission (but without depriving the owner of the property or the use of it), which makes "trespassing" a much better analogy.
If we can get enough people to start saying/writing it that way ("Trespassing on their copyright", "trespassing on their patent rights", "trespassing on their trademark") we might have a chance to bring some rationality back to the topic. If we let "them" continue controlling the language, it'll just be double-plus ungood.
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Exactly right - temporary monopoly is essentially the payment that the public makes to buy public access to "trade secrets", and the payment to authors to release useful works (historically, works that are of purely artistic merit seem to also be considered "useful" in this context) to the public, to be improved upon by the public, after the duration of the monopoly with which the access was paid for. ("To promote the progress of science and the useful arts" - the purpose of patents and copyrights is spelled out pretty plainly in the US Constitution. I'm making the assumption that the purpose is similar in other nations.)
The problem is that we're now paying for complete junk ("OOooo! Rounded corners! That will be an awesome basis for further improvements in 20 years!") in terms of patents, and paying a horrifically, obscenely inflated price (almost a CENTURY in most cases [95 years for "works for hire", which most seem to be these days, or as I recall "70 years after the author/artist dies"]).
One fix I haven't seen discussed is doing away with "flat fee" payment (i.e. a set term for all patents/copyrights) and instead having a panel offer an appropriate monopoly duration based on an estimate of the patent or artistic work's reasonable value - a genuinely plausible and novel cure for multiple cancers that would be useful for developing other cancer cures might be worth more than the standard 20 years worth of patent monopoly, while a typical low-quality "software patent" might be only worth a year or two. Copyright gets a little more difficult because in many cases the "worth" is a matter of subjective artistic merit rather than obvious "usefulness", but one might grant some truly groundbreaking piece of epic art/movie-making/music or an exceptionally useful scientific publication a full century, while a naked-midget-jello-wrestling porn video series' 12th sequel might be "paid" only a year, for example.
When the world wises up and elects me Emperor of the United States, this is but one of the much-needed reforms I'll implement, so make sure you write me in for the position during the next election.
Hey now, there are TWO parties in the US. There's the "Not-Republican Party" and the "Anti-Not-Republican Party". Obviously, they are completely different from each other.
That's only within SAMBA itself - yes, Linux has been able to serve Microsoft Windows clients in SMB2, but can Linux MOUNT an SMB2 share yet (e.g. mount.cifs)?
I haven't tested, but I presume Samba's smbclient tool might be able to handle being an SMB2 client, but that's an awkward substitute for a real filesystem mount.
The decade-long focus on playing nice with Microsoft Windows seems to be getting somewhere, but I haven't seen much about letting Linux play too.
Does CIFS implement SMB2 yet (or is there an "SMB2FS" module that I missed), or is Linux still excluded outside of "smbclient"?
Can SAMBA4's LDAP server also be used for standard basic LDAP authentication as well "e.g. for web servers, minimalistic *nix boxen, etc) or does it still only permit authentication by clients implementing a full "ActiveDirectory®" stack?
Sadly, no - the only thing that's really GPL is the kernel itself. Google has stripped out all of the other "copyleft" (i.e. "share-alike") licensed components that you'd get with a more standard Linux environment and replaced them with stripped-down BSD/Apache dismissively-licensed ("Hey, I'm taking your work and messing with it and squeezing money out of people with it, but not sharing the changes or letting people interoperate, okay?" "Meh, whatever.")* components.
I've noticed that rooted phones often end up swapping GPL components back in, most notably busybox.
* Google doesn't actually approach things this way - they do eventually share their changes for people to experiment freely. They don't HAVE to, though, nor does any third-party corporation who might want to take and use the code. Fortunately an incompatible fork like that which would result is prevented from calling itself "Android" due to trademark restrictions, at least.
EP 0618540, Microsoft's obscene "MSDOS-compatible filenames" patent on FAT32, was upheld by a German court.
Let's see - the Mantle is a hard shell around a liquid core. Marrow is a rich edible substance scraped from inside bones that has a solid or semi-solid consistency but softens when heated (cooked)...
I just had a horrifying thought - excuse me, I need to check the ingredients list on my bag of "M&M's" again...
Not to mention the fact that adding IPv6 addresses hugely dilutes the value of IP addresses - you can't just print more IP addresses without causing hyperinflation! The internet IP economy will COLLAPSE!
That's why I've been switching to doing all my communications with packets made of solid gold. It's a little slower, but no dang socialist government is going to collapse MY packets' value! I'll be the one laughing when you guys have to use like a billion IP addresses just to send one "tweet"!
"IntelliActiveDirectHTTPX Live", perhaps?
Maybe I'm weird, but aside from not caring until they hit <$200, the main thing missing from tablets that I might otherwise be interested in is GPS. If I buy a tablet, I want to be able to use it as a portable map (with better resolution than "you're somewhere within a mile or so of here") and maybe the occasional "augmented reality" application (e.g. Mixare). That's not ALL I'd want it for, of course, but its lack drops a tablet below my level of interest. Am I the only one? (And am I mistaken, or would adding GPS add no more than perhaps $2 to the marginal cost of each tablet these days?)
Trespassing.
Don't do that to me. You make my brain go strange places.
I'm picturing a security-focussed Linux-based portable computer, that uses the Linux Mint distribution, but only a really stripped-down, bare-minimum installation. Just enough that once you set up the password to log in, you can then run a virtual machine from an encrypted loopback device which actually contains a "full" Linux Mint distribution.
And then you install that setup on one of these...
"Double Mint Gum(stix)"
No more so that naming their "cloud computing" platforming after the color of a cloudless sky...
("Hey! The Emperor has no Clouds!")
I know, right? Lazy jerks still haven't bothered to cure cancer, but they still keep complaining about all these things causing cancer.
Kind of off-topic, but I've been wondering if it'd be reasonably easy to set up node.js as a fastcgi provider for cherokee or nginx to send server-side javascript to for processing. That'd give me a simple way to try simple little server-side javascript for learning.
The performance hit for doing that is pretty bad - any time you hit a .php file the system has to go start up a new PHP interpreter program. (This isn't specifically a PHP thing, plain old-school cgi is the slowest way to run anything that needs an interpreter).
I've gotten quite fond of php-fpm (an "internal" implementation of a fastcgi provider included with PHP), and as a bonus once it's set up, you can switch between cherokee, nginx, apache, lighthttpd, etc, or even some combination of them at the same time as long as they support fastcgi, without needing to do anything else to PHP configuration.
Apache is essentially the "sendmail" of web servers...
Second this - I've grown to prefer Cherokee (ridiculously easy configuration, as fast as nginx, and 'copylefted' as well), though I have no complaint using nginx as well (I'm using nginx on a virtual server running an Ubuntu release that seemed to be having some trouble with cherokee with php-fpm for reasons I wasn't able to figure out.)
I think this is doubly true now that "the two parties" seem to be largely defined by opposition to each other rather than any clear political platform intended to benefit the country and its general citizenry.
These days, "The Democratic Party" doesn't really have a clear platform, as it is really made up more or less of everybody who, regardless of their real political views, doesn't want to be "Republican(tm)" but still wants to be affiliated with a large enough political corporation to have a chance of being allowed to win an election (c.f. "Blue Dog" democrats, and President Barack Obama, who is often accused/praised as a good "moderate Republican president"). In short, they're really only definable these days as "not-Republicans". "The Republican Party", on the other hand, does seem to have a very concise and well-enforced political platform. Unfortunately, that platform is "the opposite of whatever 'The Democrats(tm)' want". They're "The Anti-Democrat Party".
tl;dr: "The Two Parties" are the "Not-Republicans" and the "Anti-Not-Republicans". Also: the US political system is a complete fustercluck, or perhaps just a circus put on by whoever is really running things...
QR Codes also don't HAVE to contain a link to a website - any arbitrary text (including phone numbers, plain text messages, etc) can be encoded in it.
I noticed that - and that some of the "Security Features" they were testing appeared to be specifically whether or not the browser prevented access to a couple of Windows-specific things.
I did skim through the paper and it's actually not too bad - they mention in several places that you can't definitively conflate their analysis with whether or not the browser is really and truly "secure". From skimming, I got the impression (someone who read it in more depth please correct me here) that many of their complaints really amount to Firefox being (arguably) more capable (i.e. you can make it do more things) and their underlying assumption is that "capability=risk".
I would swear that at least some of the security "features" they're talking about actually are already or are in development for Firefox - note that the report is for Firefox 5, which (by the new actually-get-features-out-in-a-timely-fashion development schedule that Mozilla is on) is quite old now, or at least I certainly notice a substantial improvement in responsiveness and stability since then for Firefox on Linux. Firefox 9 is scheduled to switch from "Beta" to "Stable" in the next week or so, I think...
Personally, I'm still sticking with Firefox for now. I keep a copy of Chromium on my system and I use it from time to time, but so far I find myself going back to Firefox for the functionality (not because I hate Chrom(e|ium) or anything). I still suspect they'll drop back down to a "couple of major releases per year" sort of schedule sometime after they've got silent updates working (which I think is scheduled to hit "stable" in January or February of next year if I remember correctly).
To answer your question about Chrome plugins, the one major plugin that I installed was Adblock Plus, which supposedly now can actually prevent downloading of ad "content" rather than merely hiding it after downloading as it used to do. I haven't used it enough to determine if it works as well as Adblock Plus for Firefox, but it seemed to at least be functional.
I seem to be a wierdo in this, but aside from appropriately affordable price, what I'm really waiting for is a tablet like this with GPS so that I can use it as a portable map (among other things).
I want that a lot more than the ability to let people stare at my ugly face over the internet occasionally while I'm using the tablet...
I wonder if Mozilla is trying to get as much done as possible before the risk of losing funding and being forced to fire paid evelopers and slow back down.
"Trespassing" rather than "theft". They're talking about usurpation of a "property"-use right without permission (but without depriving the owner of the property or the use of it), which makes "trespassing" a much better analogy.
If we can get enough people to start saying/writing it that way ("Trespassing on their copyright", "trespassing on their patent rights", "trespassing on their trademark") we might have a chance to bring some rationality back to the topic. If we let "them" continue controlling the language, it'll just be double-plus ungood.
I like to call that a "lawsiege".