Meanwhile, we had browser plugins working just fine to get non-HTML things like video and interactive applications on the web.
Right, like Shockwave, which only exists on Windows. Or Flash, whose 64-bit versions still are in beta and which still suffers all kinds of quirks and issues around hardware accelerated video decoding. Or Java applets, which are...well, it's Java.
There was a time when HTML did not support the use of images within a document. You had to use an external application to view them. Up until today we have to install (and update; my Windows machine at work nags me on every other boot with updaters for three different plugins) several different browser plugins to watch video, play audio and use interactive content. Now this is merging into the browser itself, which means: No more plugins to install, no more context breaking (focus grabbing etc.), and consolidated security and privacy management. There still is much work to be done. And there still are considerable security concerns. But at least in my opinion we are on the right path.
I do not know about site key bindings, but Firefox automatically disables search-as-you-type whenever something that looks like a text input box is active.
Yes. Firefox costs nothing, every platform on which version 4 ran is also supported by 5, Firefox is seldom mission critical software and I very strongly doubt that corporate IT base their planning for the next X years with volumes well into the tens or hundreds millions of Euros/Dollars on Mozilla's release cycle. The only issue I see with Mozilla's version number hopping - aside from rendering version numbers meaningless - is the needless disabling of perfectly compatible extensions. This needs to be rectified ASAP.
Yeah, but see, the thing is, Firefox 2.0 is actually *better* than any of the more recent versions. [...]
In what regards? I find the current iterations (I have been running nightlies for years so I am never quite sure about the state of the released versions) very responsive and very stable even with Flash installed, with crashes and lock-ups down to the odd horrible JS hiccup, I like the AwesomeBar, I love Sync (have been using it back from the Weave times), I love the Web Console, and there is a whole slew of extensions that I could not do without that would not have been possible - or at least had not been around at the time - in FF 2. Add to that WebM support and significant improvements in SVG rendering.
[...] with all the bitching about various Firefox changes, I've yet to see a fork that matter to anyone, so clearly the open source aspect is irrelevant.
Or maybe, just maybe the vast majority of the bitching comes from a tiny minority of users and the rest is quite happy with Firefox? The version numbers game is beyond retarded, I give you that. But at least to me there simply is no other browser that offers the same features and, more importantly, extensions that Firefox gives me.
Extensions come with a compatibility control based on version numbers. Upgrading to a new major version number will disable the vast majority of extensions unless their maintainers are really quick to issue updates...which in most cases contain no change but a higher limit on the compatibility setting. Awesome. Like they have nothing better to do.
No. By now everyone involved should have gotten the memo saying "Killing and oppressing people != communism". So they should abandon their experiments before they reach the point where they have to dig mass graves. When you burn your hand in a flame once, you are expected to learn from this experience and not hold your hand in it again. Unless you are incredibly stupid.
China is not the secure OS. They cart off prisoners, they have higher echelons who stuff their pockets etc. China is not communist. This is the "impossible to implement if the outcome should still be usable in the real world with real people" part of my post. China is the secure OS that only allows Lynx and shoots users who install other browsers.
Yes and no. Communism is like a completely secure operating system: Awesome in theory, virtually impossible to implement if the outcome should still be usable in the real world with real people. That does not make it a bad idea to try to build a secure OS. The issue lies in how much and in what way you implement security. So far any attempt to build a secure OS that is still usable in day-to-day work has failed miserably, but each such failure has given insight into why its particular way failed, so that others can avoid its mistakes and implement those parts that did work. The difference is that so far the failed attempts at building the OS have cost much less lives.
Calm down. I merely explained why it does not make sense for anyone here to attack the countries you proposed. There is nothing in it. Well, maybe lulz, but even that apparently is not enough of an incentive. Going after our own governments and industries produces a tangible result. DDOSing some state propaganda website in China? Who cares? I am not judging whether such a move is, overall, good or bad. I see lots of arguments for both sides. I understand that the attacks will be turned into prime-time proganda by our politicians. At the same time they hand out embarrassment as if there was no tomorrow and bring to light the incompetence of the very people who want to record every step we make, listen in on every conversation we have and monitor what we read and write online; It clearly shows that those people cannot be trusted with all the information they are collecting on us, that they cannot master technology the way they claim. That they are not omnipotent or untouchable.
But regardless of whether those attacks are good or bad, they produce results. That is why targets are chosen the way they are. That is why the choices make sense.
Why would any civilian living in what is subsumed under "the West" target either of those proposed countries? It is our own politicians who lie to us, it is our own banksters who stuff their pockets at our expense. I do not care about China, North Korea or Israel. If they want to go ballistic on us, I as an individual certainly do not have any means of significance at my disposal to do anything about it. Our politicians, on the other hand, can be made to suffer by exposing their wrongdoings, running campaigns against them and turning their voters against them. This is an enemy I can take on, and one whose downfall brings me tangible results.
This is mostly true for people who are already hooked to Apple's way of doing things through the iPhone or the latest iPods. I come from Linux on the desktop and Symbian S60 on the mobile, so to me the iPad 2 is not the benchmark but simply one option amongst many. So those tablets may not be much of a threat to Apple's dominance within their "home market", but they certainly mean competition over new customers.
You do not trade dollars for euros or gold for dollars or pearls for glass beads, either. You trade a belief in something's value relative to some other thing's value.
[...] pray to the bitcoin God that you aren't throwing away real money on a marketing illusion [...]
Nobody can pay their taxes with diamonds, cars or units of work, either. But everyone can exchange those items for dollars and pay their taxes with those bills. You can trade bitcoins for other currency.
My university here in Germany does exactly what you describe: Open WLAN + Cisco VPN. But they offer preconfigured clients alongside concise instructions for existing clients for anything from several versions of Windows to current Linux distros to OS X to Symbian to iOS. We have both the traditional Cisco IPSEC and the newer AnyConnect, the latter working charmingly with Ubuntu's Network Manager. Support staff use several Unix flavours and can help even with obscure problems. We can request just about any service ranging from MSDNAA software, simple web hosting or VCS hosting to access to high performance Linux clusters with seldom more effort than sending a polite e-mail.
No client monitoring of any kind, by the way. And very little restrictions overall. I did not try porn sites, but ThePirateBay and streaming sites are fully accessible, along with gaming services like Steam. Only actual peer-to-peer file-sharing applications are being frowned upon and usually result in the connection being degraded or temporarily blocked - not because of legal issues but because they use too many resources on the already pretty crowded network.
I remember reading something about btrfs support for/boot coming only in recent kernels. Ubuntu 10.10 does not have this option, and I am not sure 11.04 has it, but it definitely should be in 11.10, so I assume it requires (or coincides with? Not sure which part exactly is to blame, the kernel module or the boot loaders.) kernel versions >2.6.35. So F16 may well offer both options from a single live-cd.
Why, oh why do people always treat this question as if the earth was a perfectly uniform surface with a perfectly uniform distribution of both resources and humans? Take a look at this list of countries sorted by population growth rate. It is not the rich developed nations capable (!=willing, but we could if we really wanted to) of sustaining their poor who are multiplying, it is those who already need foreign aid to prevent mass starvation. 9 billion people would maybe be a sustainable sum total, but not as they are distributed and not on a standard of living that I personally see as desirable. The US Census Bureau predicts 2 billion people in Africa by 2050. The continent cannot reasonably sustain its current population of a little more than half of this on its own. And going by current political and social consent I somehow doubt that we will happily let a proportionate share of those 2 billion immigrate into our countries and feed them here.
I don't think the hacker ethic is about intellectualism, it's about doing. The intellectual part is a side-effect, and a helper, but it is not a requirement.
I partly disagree. As I see it the truth lays somewhere in the middle. The Hacker Manifesto sums it up nicely: "My crime is that of curiosity." Geeks should be makers, yes, but primarily they should be curious about their world. They should tinker with objects, institutions, people. They should push the boundaries of what is possible - by making things deemed impossible.
The problem that TFA sees lies not so much with geeks not being curious but with academia growing more and more useless and extraneous. Many colleges indeed are a waste of time for anyone with a functional brain. Many university courses are so narrowly focused that they really are apprenticeships/vocational trainings with the practical parts stripped away. There is nothing remotely intellectual about those courses. More than half the literature classes I had last semester were a variant of "X in Harry Potter". Smashing. And this semester I see people fail to grasp even the most basic concepts in Robinson Crusoe or Peter Pan.
Leaving the individual and your rather cheap ad hominem at him aside: The Pirate Party is one of the few smaller parties here in Germany with the potential to bring really disruptive change to the political landscape; Not so much through their own share of votes, they do not usually fare all that well in elections, but because they almost single-handedly brought matters formerly at the fringe of public interest - freedom of information and expression in the digital age, a sensible approach to compensating artists, governmental transparency and accountability - to the centre of attention for all parties. And by now they have left the initial image of an anarcho-nerdy kindergarten behind. People above the age of twenty are beginning to recognise them as a serious political movement.
And now, two days prior to a state election (that in and of itself is not really important considering it is "only" about a rather small city-state but that is closely watched as a barometer of public opinion for the next federal elections) police take their whole infrastructure offline under very questionable circumstances. I am biased as I am both German and a Pirate Party supporter, but I do consider such an act newsworthy even for such a diverse audience as slashdot's.
That was simply good old Bible-style revenge, not vigilante justice. Especially considering that the U.S. Navy SEALs do not exactly qualify for vigilante status.
they were likely drowning in support tickets about the issue, and "wontfix" would have left many of those affected with little desire to stay with Comcast;
even if they would love to see TPB go down they will want to investigate and fix any unintentional connectivity problems - "evil" management aside, they still run a network for a living;
they would be utterly retarded to hand any ammunition to the anti-monopoly/net neutrality camp right now by letting this issue stand or worse: not responding at all.
Comcast did what any half-sane company would have done. They did not go out of their way, they simply did their job. Though I grant them that considering the state of consumer ISPs they did a really good job.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, we had browser plugins working just fine to get non-HTML things like video and interactive applications on the web.
Right, like Shockwave, which only exists on Windows. Or Flash, whose 64-bit versions still are in beta and which still suffers all kinds of quirks and issues around hardware accelerated video decoding. Or Java applets, which are...well, it's Java.
There was a time when HTML did not support the use of images within a document. You had to use an external application to view them. Up until today we have to install (and update; my Windows machine at work nags me on every other boot with updaters for three different plugins) several different browser plugins to watch video, play audio and use interactive content. Now this is merging into the browser itself, which means: No more plugins to install, no more context breaking (focus grabbing etc.), and consolidated security and privacy management. There still is much work to be done. And there still are considerable security concerns. But at least in my opinion we are on the right path.
I do not know about site key bindings, but Firefox automatically disables search-as-you-type whenever something that looks like a text input box is active.
[...] With me logged in as an admin [...]
So it is the users' stupidity after all. Thank you very much for bringing this debate to a fruitful end.
Yes. Firefox costs nothing, every platform on which version 4 ran is also supported by 5, Firefox is seldom mission critical software and I very strongly doubt that corporate IT base their planning for the next X years with volumes well into the tens or hundreds millions of Euros/Dollars on Mozilla's release cycle. The only issue I see with Mozilla's version number hopping - aside from rendering version numbers meaningless - is the needless disabling of perfectly compatible extensions. This needs to be rectified ASAP.
Yeah, but see, the thing is, Firefox 2.0 is actually *better* than any of the more recent versions. [...]
In what regards? I find the current iterations (I have been running nightlies for years so I am never quite sure about the state of the released versions) very responsive and very stable even with Flash installed, with crashes and lock-ups down to the odd horrible JS hiccup, I like the AwesomeBar, I love Sync (have been using it back from the Weave times), I love the Web Console, and there is a whole slew of extensions that I could not do without that would not have been possible - or at least had not been around at the time - in FF 2. Add to that WebM support and significant improvements in SVG rendering.
[...] with all the bitching about various Firefox changes, I've yet to see a fork that matter to anyone, so clearly the open source aspect is irrelevant.
Or maybe, just maybe the vast majority of the bitching comes from a tiny minority of users and the rest is quite happy with Firefox? The version numbers game is beyond retarded, I give you that. But at least to me there simply is no other browser that offers the same features and, more importantly, extensions that Firefox gives me.
Extensions come with a compatibility control based on version numbers. Upgrading to a new major version number will disable the vast majority of extensions unless their maintainers are really quick to issue updates...which in most cases contain no change but a higher limit on the compatibility setting. Awesome. Like they have nothing better to do.
No. By now everyone involved should have gotten the memo saying "Killing and oppressing people != communism". So they should abandon their experiments before they reach the point where they have to dig mass graves. When you burn your hand in a flame once, you are expected to learn from this experience and not hold your hand in it again. Unless you are incredibly stupid.
China is not the secure OS. They cart off prisoners, they have higher echelons who stuff their pockets etc. China is not communist. This is the "impossible to implement if the outcome should still be usable in the real world with real people" part of my post. China is the secure OS that only allows Lynx and shoots users who install other browsers.
Yes and no. Communism is like a completely secure operating system: Awesome in theory, virtually impossible to implement if the outcome should still be usable in the real world with real people. That does not make it a bad idea to try to build a secure OS. The issue lies in how much and in what way you implement security. So far any attempt to build a secure OS that is still usable in day-to-day work has failed miserably, but each such failure has given insight into why its particular way failed, so that others can avoid its mistakes and implement those parts that did work. The difference is that so far the failed attempts at building the OS have cost much less lives.
Calm down. I merely explained why it does not make sense for anyone here to attack the countries you proposed. There is nothing in it. Well, maybe lulz, but even that apparently is not enough of an incentive. Going after our own governments and industries produces a tangible result. DDOSing some state propaganda website in China? Who cares? I am not judging whether such a move is, overall, good or bad. I see lots of arguments for both sides. I understand that the attacks will be turned into prime-time proganda by our politicians. At the same time they hand out embarrassment as if there was no tomorrow and bring to light the incompetence of the very people who want to record every step we make, listen in on every conversation we have and monitor what we read and write online; It clearly shows that those people cannot be trusted with all the information they are collecting on us, that they cannot master technology the way they claim. That they are not omnipotent or untouchable.
But regardless of whether those attacks are good or bad, they produce results. That is why targets are chosen the way they are. That is why the choices make sense.
Why would any civilian living in what is subsumed under "the West" target either of those proposed countries? It is our own politicians who lie to us, it is our own banksters who stuff their pockets at our expense. I do not care about China, North Korea or Israel. If they want to go ballistic on us, I as an individual certainly do not have any means of significance at my disposal to do anything about it. Our politicians, on the other hand, can be made to suffer by exposing their wrongdoings, running campaigns against them and turning their voters against them. This is an enemy I can take on, and one whose downfall brings me tangible results.
being a fan of the richest and most beloved tech company on the planet is stupid
Yes. But considering Apple the most beloved tech company on the planet beats even that.
This is mostly true for people who are already hooked to Apple's way of doing things through the iPhone or the latest iPods. I come from Linux on the desktop and Symbian S60 on the mobile, so to me the iPad 2 is not the benchmark but simply one option amongst many. So those tablets may not be much of a threat to Apple's dominance within their "home market", but they certainly mean competition over new customers.
You do not trade dollars for euros or gold for dollars or pearls for glass beads, either. You trade a belief in something's value relative to some other thing's value.
[...] pray to the bitcoin God that you aren't throwing away real money on a marketing illusion [...]
What is "real" money?
Nobody can pay their taxes with diamonds, cars or units of work, either. But everyone can exchange those items for dollars and pay their taxes with those bills. You can trade bitcoins for other currency.
My university here in Germany does exactly what you describe: Open WLAN + Cisco VPN. But they offer preconfigured clients alongside concise instructions for existing clients for anything from several versions of Windows to current Linux distros to OS X to Symbian to iOS. We have both the traditional Cisco IPSEC and the newer AnyConnect, the latter working charmingly with Ubuntu's Network Manager. Support staff use several Unix flavours and can help even with obscure problems. We can request just about any service ranging from MSDNAA software, simple web hosting or VCS hosting to access to high performance Linux clusters with seldom more effort than sending a polite e-mail.
No client monitoring of any kind, by the way. And very little restrictions overall. I did not try porn sites, but ThePirateBay and streaming sites are fully accessible, along with gaming services like Steam. Only actual peer-to-peer file-sharing applications are being frowned upon and usually result in the connection being degraded or temporarily blocked - not because of legal issues but because they use too many resources on the already pretty crowded network.
I remember reading something about btrfs support for /boot coming only in recent kernels. Ubuntu 10.10 does not have this option, and I am not sure 11.04 has it, but it definitely should be in 11.10, so I assume it requires (or coincides with? Not sure which part exactly is to blame, the kernel module or the boot loaders.) kernel versions >2.6.35. So F16 may well offer both options from a single live-cd.
Why, oh why do people always treat this question as if the earth was a perfectly uniform surface with a perfectly uniform distribution of both resources and humans? Take a look at this list of countries sorted by population growth rate. It is not the rich developed nations capable (!=willing, but we could if we really wanted to) of sustaining their poor who are multiplying, it is those who already need foreign aid to prevent mass starvation. 9 billion people would maybe be a sustainable sum total, but not as they are distributed and not on a standard of living that I personally see as desirable. The US Census Bureau predicts 2 billion people in Africa by 2050. The continent cannot reasonably sustain its current population of a little more than half of this on its own. And going by current political and social consent I somehow doubt that we will happily let a proportionate share of those 2 billion immigrate into our countries and feed them here.
I don't think the hacker ethic is about intellectualism, it's about doing. The intellectual part is a side-effect, and a helper, but it is not a requirement.
I partly disagree. As I see it the truth lays somewhere in the middle. The Hacker Manifesto sums it up nicely: "My crime is that of curiosity." Geeks should be makers, yes, but primarily they should be curious about their world. They should tinker with objects, institutions, people. They should push the boundaries of what is possible - by making things deemed impossible.
The problem that TFA sees lies not so much with geeks not being curious but with academia growing more and more useless and extraneous. Many colleges indeed are a waste of time for anyone with a functional brain. Many university courses are so narrowly focused that they really are apprenticeships/vocational trainings with the practical parts stripped away. There is nothing remotely intellectual about those courses. More than half the literature classes I had last semester were a variant of "X in Harry Potter". Smashing. And this semester I see people fail to grasp even the most basic concepts in Robinson Crusoe or Peter Pan.
Leaving the individual and your rather cheap ad hominem at him aside: The Pirate Party is one of the few smaller parties here in Germany with the potential to bring really disruptive change to the political landscape; Not so much through their own share of votes, they do not usually fare all that well in elections, but because they almost single-handedly brought matters formerly at the fringe of public interest - freedom of information and expression in the digital age, a sensible approach to compensating artists, governmental transparency and accountability - to the centre of attention for all parties. And by now they have left the initial image of an anarcho-nerdy kindergarten behind. People above the age of twenty are beginning to recognise them as a serious political movement.
And now, two days prior to a state election (that in and of itself is not really important considering it is "only" about a rather small city-state but that is closely watched as a barometer of public opinion for the next federal elections) police take their whole infrastructure offline under very questionable circumstances. I am biased as I am both German and a Pirate Party supporter, but I do consider such an act newsworthy even for such a diverse audience as slashdot's.
That was simply good old Bible-style revenge, not vigilante justice. Especially considering that the U.S. Navy SEALs do not exactly qualify for vigilante status.
Apparently a few thousand turks do share those "western" values.
Sure. Three times. Then you will have to wait until I come home. And reset the lock on my computer. Which stands in my living-room.
Comcast did what any half-sane company would have done. They did not go out of their way, they simply did their job. Though I grant them that considering the state of consumer ISPs they did a really good job.