Actually, I think the webkit was a fantastic move (even though I am a staunch user of Gecko. With another actual corporation working on Webkit, Apple will be forced to actually work with the open source community, rather than releasing their changes once a year, leaving the KHTML devs with a massive merge headache. Now there are so many people working on Webkit that it's Apple, not Konqueror that will get left by the wayside if they don't release their changes.
As already mentioned, Reiss is clearly not a creationist (as you would know if you had RTFA.)
His basic point is that students with creationist views will clam up and refuse to learn any biology since the basis for biology is contrary to their beliefs. Failure to address these beliefs is failure to teach these students real science. These students have not heard of the enlightenment, and are guaranteed to be hostile to it if their beliefs are not addressed.
He's comparing a Windows-only engine, hyperoptimized for Windows, to a three-platform engine that in recent tests is performing equally well. Get back to me when I can use V8 in a meaningful way without rebooting.
This goes back to the whole "trusting trust" concept. You have no way of knowing if the source you've been given reflects the binary you're using, unless you yourself compiled it (and hand-crafted the compiler you're using in assembly, and made the assembly language for your CPU, and made your CPU, but those are a different discussion.)
The point is, Red Hat signs their packages. If their signing mechanism has been compromised, it is quite conceivable that every single Red Hat package is untrustworthy. The dates on the packages are only as trustworthy as the key, so there is no beginning or end time for this: you must throw out all Red Hat packages on your system, because any could be compromised.
Source really gives you very little assurance unless you compile it.
If we want to look at this in contrast to Windows, there's not really any comparison, since we barely even begin to have a grasp of their Byzantine updating system, and couldn't even speculate as to the effects of a similar problem on their side.
From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit. A testament to the rate at which Gecko has been improving is its newfound viability in the mobile space, where it was practically considered a nonstarter not too long ago. Mozilla clearly has the resources, developer expertise, and community support to take Gecko anywhere that WebKit can go.
Who exactly is claiming that Gecko is bloated?
Also, XUL holds an extraordinary amount of promise as a successor to old-style Java apps. Webkit has nothing resembling it: all it does is render HTML + CSS.
The idea that we can create a standard that makes a page work both functionally and prettily on both an iPhone and a quad-core machine with a 30 inch display is just stupid.
Layouts must be open to change. The disparity between iPhone and 30 inch display is impassable next to the disparity between even IE5 and Webkit.
I've got a couple of of CS books I use frequently, but only because they're paper, and I like paper. Glancing back and forth between Wikipedia and my textbooks, the only discrepancies are because the books start out a year out of date.
And Wikipedia tends to be a lot less dense, without a loss of content.
One of the test pages I was working on for a website I was designing a few months ago had some weird z-index issues. I need to find that and test it against beta 2.
Really, the problem is both names are inadequate. However, given the choice, I prefer GNU.
As a Mennonite, I have a serious problem with anything named after a human being such a central part of my life. It smacks too much of idolatry.
As a free software advocate, I have a problem with naming such a wide-reaching project with so many contributors after a single man. Something like Debian is a little better, since at least it's a tribute to two people.
On the other hand, we have an operating system named after a wildebeest. Actually, I was going to end this on a note that something like "humanity towards others" really makes the most sense for a FOSS OS (that would be Ubuntu for those of you just tuning in.) However, Wildebeest sounds like something I could get behind. That's a good name.
The M13 viruses used by the team can't reproduce by themselves and are only capable of infecting bacteria.
How is the fact that they can only infect bacteria relevant? I have plenty of essential bacteria that I consider more or less my organs. That is not any better than saying it can only infect kidney cells.
If they cannot reproduce (even after infecting a bacterium) it shouldn't matter, as there should not be a sufficient amount of these
to stop anything.
However, if these things are being mass produced, it seems to me the odds are that pretty soon at least one virus will show up that can reproduce itself. The question is: how many mistakes in transcribing the virus' genome in the lab would be required to allow it to reproduce?
Copying errors are the heart of evolution, and they will happen even on the production line.
Solar panels obviously degrade under continuous use, but will it degrade in a vacuum pointed away from the sun? As I recall the life span of most solar panels is something like 10 years... say we extended that to 20, and designed its orbit such that it was only getting sufficient power to degrade the panel and send a strong signal for 1 year out of every 100, we could manage 2000 years exactly.
Though I'm no expert on solar panels, and we don't really have any data on low-use solar panels over a century, to speak nothing of two millennia.
Everyone who continuously complains about the inadequacy of the web browser needs to step back, and remember that it is designed to be crippled. If it were as fully functional as the desktop, any yahoo could come by and completely replace your desktop with something of their choosing. I don't need DHTML to watch movies and read the news. I need Firefox and some interlinked markup. Anything more than that is opening up the web to all sorts of attacks that don't need to happen. We don't need a better JavaScript. It would be nice for programmers, but less secure for users.
They are also perfectly well able to hire people to go look at the files in person.
The concern is that people could access these records anonymously and without supervision. Though yes, bigwigs and bad boys in the government and elsewhere can access these documents, odds are there will be a paper trail given the resources required to do this sort of thing. Barring the paper trail, there should still be some internal accountability - people can't use these resources on a whim, which I think is the point. I shouldn't be able to look at your court records just because I'm bored and surfing the net. There needs to be at least a little more effort required than that.
The problem is that it cannot be copied at all. Innovations occur when someone can take your design and improve on it after a reasonable period of time. However, in this industry, a reasonable period of time would be something like 5 years. Any more than that means that any company with a successful product has a monopoly after 4 or 5 years. Intel cannot have sole control over the chipsets in every desktop PC. That has antitrust written all over it.
The article says that the problem is that the public keys to the chips aren't being used. Every country maintains their own database of public keys used to identify the passwords. The databases aren't all properly set up to synchronize, so the system must accept all chips from countries that have not synchronized, basically rendering the encryption moot if you know which countries haven't authenticated properly.
So the chip itself hasn't been cracked, it's more a question of the international passport encryption network being worthless. Even if everyone was synchronizing properly, such a system sounds highly vulnerable to a cache poisoning attack of some sort.
While in principle what you say may be correct, I think using insecure wireless to transfer credit information is a crime in and of itself. That literally amounts to broadcasting the numbers to anyone nearby the store. I'd almost say that goes beyond negligence. That's hitting golf balls off your roof and then claiming you didn't know anyone was down there. Granted, you may not have known - I suppose to take this metaphor to the proper extent we'll say you live in a field in the middle of nowhere. However, you only own the land around your house, and you have no excuse for harming someone by hitting the ball into an area you do not control - that is downright criminal if it hits some(one|thing).
Isn't Yahoo in an ideal position to make this sort of probing useless? Just redirect all non-existent traffic with an unsubscribe header to a daemon that requests to be unsubscribed... then if you keep getting mail, you either ignore it or you use it, since you have the largest pool of honeypot email addresses on the planet.
Likewise they could in theory hit unsubscribe on behalf of their customers and then grab the resultant traffic. Of course, this is more open to attack, as the attacker can just switch email addresses. But if you're also unsubscribing all non-existent traffic, I'd say this will actually begin to get a lot more expensive for the would-be spammer than Yahoo, and the spammer would just stop trying to brute-force Yahoo.
Actually, I'd say that it was more a question of keeping the lower classes in check, not any stubbornness on their part. Hieroglyphs' main disadvantage is how difficult they are to learn. For any elite society, this is in fact a boon, because the peasants do not have time to learn hieroglyphics and work. An alphabet you can easily learn in your time off from the fields. As soon as that happens, you become intelligent and annoyed with your rulers.
Therefore, alphabets cause peasant revolts. Which is why Egypt was a powerhouse.
Chemistry's rules exist because they functionally explain chemistry in an accessible manner. Physicists have known that there are more accurate models for a while. Unfortunately, these models are too complex to be useful to someone trying to synthesize a chemical. If this has any significant applications, we will still be seeing classical chemistry for at least a century to come (barring the singularity.)
I mean, it's been almost a century since relativity and quantum mechanics came on the scene, but for the majority of engineering tasks, they remain useless. Between processors hitting the atomic scale and more probes hitting the atmosphere, that may change. However, I don't see chemistry getting to the point where we even begin to see practical chemistry that doesn't rely on classical models. The new ones are simply to complex to use.
They've said that this does not prove the existence of life... the only thing that I could think of is some sort of hydrocarbon that does not definitely come from life.
The trouble is, LSB would essentially turn into ICANN in that regard. How do you determine what qualifies a library for inclusion in LSB except by charging like we do for domain names? Of course, there could also be a vetting process, but one person decides that the vetting process is not working for them, and suddenly you have an alternate version of libSSL floating around that's required for a specific program, and before long the entire thing falls flat.
We need things to be as much as possible the same. That way, all we have to do is a few autoconfig hacks, which hopefully will disappear soon enough (to be replaced by other dissimilarities we need to standardize.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think the webkit was a fantastic move (even though I am a staunch user of Gecko. With another actual corporation working on Webkit, Apple will be forced to actually work with the open source community, rather than releasing their changes once a year, leaving the KHTML devs with a massive merge headache. Now there are so many people working on Webkit that it's Apple, not Konqueror that will get left by the wayside if they don't release their changes.
As already mentioned, Reiss is clearly not a creationist (as you would know if you had RTFA.)
His basic point is that students with creationist views will clam up and refuse to learn any biology since the basis for biology is contrary to their beliefs. Failure to address these beliefs is failure to teach these students real science. These students have not heard of the enlightenment, and are guaranteed to be hostile to it if their beliefs are not addressed.
He's comparing a Windows-only engine, hyperoptimized for Windows, to a three-platform engine that in recent tests is performing equally well. Get back to me when I can use V8 in a meaningful way without rebooting.
Sure, if you're just browsing porn. What if all you care about is what the website knows about you (Google search records anyone?)
This goes back to the whole "trusting trust" concept. You have no way of knowing if the source you've been given reflects the binary you're using, unless you yourself compiled it (and hand-crafted the compiler you're using in assembly, and made the assembly language for your CPU, and made your CPU, but those are a different discussion.)
The point is, Red Hat signs their packages. If their signing mechanism has been compromised, it is quite conceivable that every single Red Hat package is untrustworthy. The dates on the packages are only as trustworthy as the key, so there is no beginning or end time for this: you must throw out all Red Hat packages on your system, because any could be compromised.
Source really gives you very little assurance unless you compile it.
If we want to look at this in contrast to Windows, there's not really any comparison, since we barely even begin to have a grasp of their Byzantine updating system, and couldn't even speculate as to the effects of a similar problem on their side.
Who exactly is claiming that Gecko is bloated? Also, XUL holds an extraordinary amount of promise as a successor to old-style Java apps. Webkit has nothing resembling it: all it does is render HTML + CSS.
The idea that we can create a standard that makes a page work both functionally and prettily on both an iPhone and a quad-core machine with a 30 inch display is just stupid.
Layouts must be open to change. The disparity between iPhone and 30 inch display is impassable next to the disparity between even IE5 and Webkit.
I've got a couple of of CS books I use frequently, but only because they're paper, and I like paper. Glancing back and forth between Wikipedia and my textbooks, the only discrepancies are because the books start out a year out of date.
And Wikipedia tends to be a lot less dense, without a loss of content.
One of the test pages I was working on for a website I was designing a few months ago had some weird z-index issues. I need to find that and test it against beta 2.
Really, the problem is both names are inadequate. However, given the choice, I prefer GNU.
As a Mennonite, I have a serious problem with anything named after a human being such a central part of my life. It smacks too much of idolatry.
As a free software advocate, I have a problem with naming such a wide-reaching project with so many contributors after a single man. Something like Debian is a little better, since at least it's a tribute to two people.
On the other hand, we have an operating system named after a wildebeest. Actually, I was going to end this on a note that something like "humanity towards others" really makes the most sense for a FOSS OS (that would be Ubuntu for those of you just tuning in.) However, Wildebeest sounds like something I could get behind. That's a good name.
How is the fact that they can only infect bacteria relevant? I have plenty of essential bacteria that I consider more or less my organs. That is not any better than saying it can only infect kidney cells.
If they cannot reproduce (even after infecting a bacterium) it shouldn't matter, as there should not be a sufficient amount of these to stop anything.
However, if these things are being mass produced, it seems to me the odds are that pretty soon at least one virus will show up that can reproduce itself. The question is: how many mistakes in transcribing the virus' genome in the lab would be required to allow it to reproduce?
Copying errors are the heart of evolution, and they will happen even on the production line.
That's because they come out every month. Wouldn't be news unless managed another half again on Moore's law.
Solar panels obviously degrade under continuous use, but will it degrade in a vacuum pointed away from the sun? As I recall the life span of most solar panels is something like 10 years... say we extended that to 20, and designed its orbit such that it was only getting sufficient power to degrade the panel and send a strong signal for 1 year out of every 100, we could manage 2000 years exactly.
Though I'm no expert on solar panels, and we don't really have any data on low-use solar panels over a century, to speak nothing of two millennia.
Everyone who continuously complains about the inadequacy of the web browser needs to step back, and remember that it is designed to be crippled. If it were as fully functional as the desktop, any yahoo could come by and completely replace your desktop with something of their choosing. I don't need DHTML to watch movies and read the news. I need Firefox and some interlinked markup. Anything more than that is opening up the web to all sorts of attacks that don't need to happen. We don't need a better JavaScript. It would be nice for programmers, but less secure for users.
They are also perfectly well able to hire people to go look at the files in person.
The concern is that people could access these records anonymously and without supervision. Though yes, bigwigs and bad boys in the government and elsewhere can access these documents, odds are there will be a paper trail given the resources required to do this sort of thing. Barring the paper trail, there should still be some internal accountability - people can't use these resources on a whim, which I think is the point. I shouldn't be able to look at your court records just because I'm bored and surfing the net. There needs to be at least a little more effort required than that.
The problem is that it cannot be copied at all. Innovations occur when someone can take your design and improve on it after a reasonable period of time. However, in this industry, a reasonable period of time would be something like 5 years. Any more than that means that any company with a successful product has a monopoly after 4 or 5 years. Intel cannot have sole control over the chipsets in every desktop PC. That has antitrust written all over it.
The article says that the problem is that the public keys to the chips aren't being used. Every country maintains their own database of public keys used to identify the passwords. The databases aren't all properly set up to synchronize, so the system must accept all chips from countries that have not synchronized, basically rendering the encryption moot if you know which countries haven't authenticated properly. So the chip itself hasn't been cracked, it's more a question of the international passport encryption network being worthless. Even if everyone was synchronizing properly, such a system sounds highly vulnerable to a cache poisoning attack of some sort.
While in principle what you say may be correct, I think using insecure wireless to transfer credit information is a crime in and of itself. That literally amounts to broadcasting the numbers to anyone nearby the store. I'd almost say that goes beyond negligence. That's hitting golf balls off your roof and then claiming you didn't know anyone was down there. Granted, you may not have known - I suppose to take this metaphor to the proper extent we'll say you live in a field in the middle of nowhere. However, you only own the land around your house, and you have no excuse for harming someone by hitting the ball into an area you do not control - that is downright criminal if it hits some(one|thing).
Fixed.
I said the majority. By which I meant a good 60%.
And by classical models, I meant orbitals.
By quantum, I mean crazy theoretical shit where orbitals have weird coefficients that most chemists don't need to worry about.
Isn't Yahoo in an ideal position to make this sort of probing useless? Just redirect all non-existent traffic with an unsubscribe header to a daemon that requests to be unsubscribed... then if you keep getting mail, you either ignore it or you use it, since you have the largest pool of honeypot email addresses on the planet.
Likewise they could in theory hit unsubscribe on behalf of their customers and then grab the resultant traffic. Of course, this is more open to attack, as the attacker can just switch email addresses. But if you're also unsubscribing all non-existent traffic, I'd say this will actually begin to get a lot more expensive for the would-be spammer than Yahoo, and the spammer would just stop trying to brute-force Yahoo.
Actually, I'd say that it was more a question of keeping the lower classes in check, not any stubbornness on their part. Hieroglyphs' main disadvantage is how difficult they are to learn. For any elite society, this is in fact a boon, because the peasants do not have time to learn hieroglyphics and work. An alphabet you can easily learn in your time off from the fields. As soon as that happens, you become intelligent and annoyed with your rulers.
Therefore, alphabets cause peasant revolts. Which is why Egypt was a powerhouse.
Chemistry's rules exist because they functionally explain chemistry in an accessible manner. Physicists have known that there are more accurate models for a while. Unfortunately, these models are too complex to be useful to someone trying to synthesize a chemical. If this has any significant applications, we will still be seeing classical chemistry for at least a century to come (barring the singularity.)
I mean, it's been almost a century since relativity and quantum mechanics came on the scene, but for the majority of engineering tasks, they remain useless. Between processors hitting the atomic scale and more probes hitting the atmosphere, that may change. However, I don't see chemistry getting to the point where we even begin to see practical chemistry that doesn't rely on classical models. The new ones are simply to complex to use.
They've said that this does not prove the existence of life... the only thing that I could think of is some sort of hydrocarbon that does not definitely come from life.
So chalk one up for abiotic theory?
The trouble is, LSB would essentially turn into ICANN in that regard. How do you determine what qualifies a library for inclusion in LSB except by charging like we do for domain names? Of course, there could also be a vetting process, but one person decides that the vetting process is not working for them, and suddenly you have an alternate version of libSSL floating around that's required for a specific program, and before long the entire thing falls flat.
We need things to be as much as possible the same. That way, all we have to do is a few autoconfig hacks, which hopefully will disappear soon enough (to be replaced by other dissimilarities we need to standardize.)