I don't think that would be a useful legal trend. First of all, every security device (from software to padlocks to alarm systems) is imperfect. They will all fail at a certain point. They are marketed as providing a level of security: not infinite security.
Secondly, laws like that would only discourage companies from even trying. In the physical world, no company would be willing to undertake the legal liability for selling padlocks. In software, no company would be willing to sell security software (or any software at all if the law applied broadly). Alternately, software would cost a fortune (the liability insurance would be built-in). This would also kill free/open-source software, since they would have no way to pay for the liability insurance and legal bills that would result from a compromised vulnerability.
Ultimately the people in charge of data/computers must be the ones held responsible. If you store top secret files in a cheap file cabinet, it's not the fault of the file-cabinet maker when someone breaks the lock and steals the files. Similarly if a company poorly implements security software, that is their fault... not the software vendor's.
I see this as less of a caller ID issue and more of a classic 911-prank issue.
If the caller ID were not available, or were from a cellphone, or didn't make sense, or whatever else, the 911 responder would still have been obliged to send emergency personnel. If a call sounds legit (and often even if it doesn't), the police will respond, regardless of what caller ID says. Ultimately this was a dangerous prank and should be treated as such.
The caller ID spoofing merely means that it took a bit longer to track down the prankster. You might argue that the insecurity of caller ID gave the prankster the guts to make a fake call in the first place. But then again, pranksters can use pay phones if they want anonymity. In any case the police will respond to the call.
We should step back and marvel at just how amazing this is. I'm not trying to make fun of your post... but really when you think about the sheer computing power (and portability) you're getting for <$400, it's amazing. Not that long ago, the idea of a sub-$300 computer would have been ridiculous, much less something that is as small as a book, has a 900 MHz processor, 512 Mb of RAM, etc.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that "affordable" is inherently a moving target. If today we think that $400 is not low enough for an ultra-portable laptop... then probably in 5 years we'll be complaining that our "underpowered" (core2duo) e-book readers are over-priced at $100. There is no "bottom" in this race.
I'm not sure if exposing some tax fraud is a goal high enough to disregard legal standards. Well this is the fundamental question of whistle-blowing. Nearly all whistle-blowing is illegal, since someone is violating a confidentiality agreement, breaking a contract, publishing private information, etc.
I don't know to what extent this has been legally codified, but the consensus has grown to be that whistle-blowing should be somehow allowed, or even encouraged and protected. This is why we consider it reasonable for a reporter to "not disclose a source" and why Wikileaks should be protected.
If the information can be shown to be false, then yes it should be removed. But unauthorized publication of data which unequivocally proves that some bigger crime has occurred has to be allowed and protected if we are going to fight big crimes. This protection has to extend to the original whistle-blower, and the reporting agents (journalists, wikileaks, etc.), even though they may be technically breaking certain laws (e.g. disclosure of private data).
Re:No such thing as a closed source port to open O
on
Adobe To Port AIR To Linux
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· Score: 3, Informative
You say that, and yet there are plenty of proprietary binaries available for Linux. Many distros have huge repositories of "non-free" stuff. Plenty of proprietary vendors make Linux binaries available (e.g. nVidia binary driver, Opera, Skype, etc. See also this list, much of which is distributed in binary-only form).
Yes, the vendor will probably only pre-compile binaries for the most popular architectures (32-bit x86 being the main one), and only for the most popular packaging formats (deb and rpm). But really that covers the vast majority of Linux users anyway.
Yes, it's a pain for the vendor to compile/package 2-8 versions instead of just one, but it's hardly the insurmountable obstacle you make it out to be.
Re:People use Photoshop to Dev the Web too Adobe!
on
Adobe To Port AIR To Linux
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Port the Adobe suites to linux. The funny thing is that at this point it would probably take about an afternoon for Adobe to port Photoshop to Linux.
Yes, I'm exaggerating... but only slightly. Currently Photoshop runs essentially flawlessly using up-to-date versions of Wine. Remember that Wine is intended both as a run-time compatibility layer, but also as a set of Windows API libraries that you can compile your Windows code against in order to make a native Linux application. (Well, some people might debate that the resulting app is actually native since it relies on Wine libraries being installed, rather than the more widespread Linux toolkits like GTK or QT.)
Given that the Wine project has already done 99% of the work, I can't imagine it would be very difficult to port Photoshop to Linux... The same is probably true for the rest of the suite. So, one wonders why they haven't bothered yet.
The evidence for gravitational lensing is much stronger than that. In the most extreme images, we can actually see multiple images of a single source. In this image, there are four copies of the distant quasar because of the lensing of the closer galaxy (center of image). Even though gravitational lensing is a fairly small effect, given the massive distances we're talking about, the deviations are readily measurable.
Also, many of the measurements come from Hubble images, for which there is no atmospheric turbulence to deal with (atmospheric effects also average-out over a fairly short period of time, and though they decrease resolution they are easy to differentiate from astronomical sources of distortion).
The error bars are small enough that we know the light from distant sources is being deflected. The simplest explanation is that there is a cluster of mass between us and the source, whose gravity is deflecting the light.
The "rubber sheet" analogy is imperfect, but I don't think your revised analogy is correct.
Draw a line running between the bowling ball and marble, and take that cross section, note that the bowling ball and marble behave the same way at close distance like they do above, but when they are a opposite sides of the pool there is a slight "repulsive" effect. We call that Dark Energy! "Dark energy" doesn't mean that normal matter is repulsive at large distances. Ordinary matter is always gravitationally attractive towards other ordinary matter, at all scales. Same for dark matter (whatever it is). "Dark energy" is, in fact, a "negative pressure" that pushes on spacetime itself, causing the universe to expand (and moreover gets stronger and stronger the lower its density becomes).
If dark energy sounds counter-intuitive: it should! Of course we don't really know what it is (yet), but the experimental evidence available thus far does not suggest that matter is repulsive at large distances, but rather that "something" fills spacetime and exerts an expansion force that is inversely proportional to its density.
This effect will also affect light waves moving past it, hence gravitational lensing. Just to be clear: gravitational lensing also has nothing to do with dark energy... and nothing to do with dark matter specifically. Any source of gravity (ordinary matter, dark matter, etc.) will deflect the path of light rays (the effect is small but measurable). Thus gravitational lensing is a great way to determine the "amount of mass" within a volume of space. When that mass is correlated with brightness, we say it's ordinary matter (stars, etc.) and when that mass is correlated with seemingly empty patches of space (dark), we call it dark matter.
First, remember that the distribution of dark matter and ordinary matter are, actually, pretty similar (we find galaxies accumulated along the dark matter filaments, and at smaller scales see dark matter concentrated into galaxies).
Second, my understanding is that dark matter (whatever it is) must be fairly weakly-interacting. The normal matter that we see aggregating into stars and galaxies interacts with itself (the particles bounce off each other, exchanging momentum, and also they repel each other at very short distances). This interaction, in addition to gravity, dictates the shapes we see for ordinary matter.
Dark matter doesn't interact strongly (with matter, and presumably with itself), so it aggregates differently. Imagine a cluster of dark matter that is being gravitationally collapsed: as the particles get closer to each other, instead of bouncing off each other (and thereby e.g. transforming their large-scale kinetic energy into heat), they 'pass through' each other (actually just pass by each other without scattering). This means that the matter will aggregate differently (the dark matter particles will mutually gravitate and orbit, but can't coalesce).
I'm painting a simplistic picture, but the point is that there are some fundamental differences about how dark matter interacts, versus ordinary matter. I believe the filamentary structure itself is an artifact of the universe's inflationary epoch, where massive expansion has amplified small-scale quantum fluctuations into the very large-scale distribution we now see.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that would be a useful legal trend. First of all, every security device (from software to padlocks to alarm systems) is imperfect. They will all fail at a certain point. They are marketed as providing a level of security: not infinite security.
Secondly, laws like that would only discourage companies from even trying. In the physical world, no company would be willing to undertake the legal liability for selling padlocks. In software, no company would be willing to sell security software (or any software at all if the law applied broadly). Alternately, software would cost a fortune (the liability insurance would be built-in). This would also kill free/open-source software, since they would have no way to pay for the liability insurance and legal bills that would result from a compromised vulnerability.
Ultimately the people in charge of data/computers must be the ones held responsible. If you store top secret files in a cheap file cabinet, it's not the fault of the file-cabinet maker when someone breaks the lock and steals the files. Similarly if a company poorly implements security software, that is their fault... not the software vendor's.
I see this as less of a caller ID issue and more of a classic 911-prank issue.
If the caller ID were not available, or were from a cellphone, or didn't make sense, or whatever else, the 911 responder would still have been obliged to send emergency personnel. If a call sounds legit (and often even if it doesn't), the police will respond, regardless of what caller ID says. Ultimately this was a dangerous prank and should be treated as such.
The caller ID spoofing merely means that it took a bit longer to track down the prankster. You might argue that the insecurity of caller ID gave the prankster the guts to make a fake call in the first place. But then again, pranksters can use pay phones if they want anonymity. In any case the police will respond to the call.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that "affordable" is inherently a moving target. If today we think that $400 is not low enough for an ultra-portable laptop... then probably in 5 years we'll be complaining that our "underpowered" (core2duo) e-book readers are over-priced at $100. There is no "bottom" in this race.
I don't know to what extent this has been legally codified, but the consensus has grown to be that whistle-blowing should be somehow allowed, or even encouraged and protected. This is why we consider it reasonable for a reporter to "not disclose a source" and why Wikileaks should be protected.
If the information can be shown to be false, then yes it should be removed. But unauthorized publication of data which unequivocally proves that some bigger crime has occurred has to be allowed and protected if we are going to fight big crimes. This protection has to extend to the original whistle-blower, and the reporting agents (journalists, wikileaks, etc.), even though they may be technically breaking certain laws (e.g. disclosure of private data).
You say that, and yet there are plenty of proprietary binaries available for Linux. Many distros have huge repositories of "non-free" stuff. Plenty of proprietary vendors make Linux binaries available (e.g. nVidia binary driver, Opera, Skype, etc. See also this list, much of which is distributed in binary-only form).
Yes, the vendor will probably only pre-compile binaries for the most popular architectures (32-bit x86 being the main one), and only for the most popular packaging formats (deb and rpm). But really that covers the vast majority of Linux users anyway.
Yes, it's a pain for the vendor to compile/package 2-8 versions instead of just one, but it's hardly the insurmountable obstacle you make it out to be.
Yes, I'm exaggerating... but only slightly. Currently Photoshop runs essentially flawlessly using up-to-date versions of Wine. Remember that Wine is intended both as a run-time compatibility layer, but also as a set of Windows API libraries that you can compile your Windows code against in order to make a native Linux application. (Well, some people might debate that the resulting app is actually native since it relies on Wine libraries being installed, rather than the more widespread Linux toolkits like GTK or QT.)
Given that the Wine project has already done 99% of the work, I can't imagine it would be very difficult to port Photoshop to Linux... The same is probably true for the rest of the suite. So, one wonders why they haven't bothered yet.
The evidence for gravitational lensing is much stronger than that. In the most extreme images, we can actually see multiple images of a single source. In this image, there are four copies of the distant quasar because of the lensing of the closer galaxy (center of image). Even though gravitational lensing is a fairly small effect, given the massive distances we're talking about, the deviations are readily measurable.
Also, many of the measurements come from Hubble images, for which there is no atmospheric turbulence to deal with (atmospheric effects also average-out over a fairly short period of time, and though they decrease resolution they are easy to differentiate from astronomical sources of distortion).
The error bars are small enough that we know the light from distant sources is being deflected. The simplest explanation is that there is a cluster of mass between us and the source, whose gravity is deflecting the light.
If dark energy sounds counter-intuitive: it should! Of course we don't really know what it is (yet), but the experimental evidence available thus far does not suggest that matter is repulsive at large distances, but rather that "something" fills spacetime and exerts an expansion force that is inversely proportional to its density. This effect will also affect light waves moving past it, hence gravitational lensing. Just to be clear: gravitational lensing also has nothing to do with dark energy... and nothing to do with dark matter specifically. Any source of gravity (ordinary matter, dark matter, etc.) will deflect the path of light rays (the effect is small but measurable). Thus gravitational lensing is a great way to determine the "amount of mass" within a volume of space. When that mass is correlated with brightness, we say it's ordinary matter (stars, etc.) and when that mass is correlated with seemingly empty patches of space (dark), we call it dark matter.
First, remember that the distribution of dark matter and ordinary matter are, actually, pretty similar (we find galaxies accumulated along the dark matter filaments, and at smaller scales see dark matter concentrated into galaxies).
Second, my understanding is that dark matter (whatever it is) must be fairly weakly-interacting. The normal matter that we see aggregating into stars and galaxies interacts with itself (the particles bounce off each other, exchanging momentum, and also they repel each other at very short distances). This interaction, in addition to gravity, dictates the shapes we see for ordinary matter.
Dark matter doesn't interact strongly (with matter, and presumably with itself), so it aggregates differently. Imagine a cluster of dark matter that is being gravitationally collapsed: as the particles get closer to each other, instead of bouncing off each other (and thereby e.g. transforming their large-scale kinetic energy into heat), they 'pass through' each other (actually just pass by each other without scattering). This means that the matter will aggregate differently (the dark matter particles will mutually gravitate and orbit, but can't coalesce).
I'm painting a simplistic picture, but the point is that there are some fundamental differences about how dark matter interacts, versus ordinary matter. I believe the filamentary structure itself is an artifact of the universe's inflationary epoch, where massive expansion has amplified small-scale quantum fluctuations into the very large-scale distribution we now see.