So, who are those "patriots" in Silicon Valley supposedly willing to give him, again, the keys to all the personal information that they collect?
I can make a guess, by looking at the track record and the lobbying spending of the usual suspects, but still it would be more appropriate, in the name of transparency, to state explicitly whether the companies that we are entrusting with our personal information are a neutral third party or, instead, are patriots. So we can choose.
If you were using coreutils in your nightmare, you would actually have no problem:
(guys, don't do this at home, your rm implementation could differ)
# rm -rf/
rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe
# rm --version
rm (GNU coreutils) 8.23
You wouldn't enjoy such protection if you typed rm -rf/*, however.
Seeing the slashdot crowd, which is pro-capitalism and laissez faire when it's the other people's source of income which is being put in jeopardy, suddendly start to scream in pain because of the fear of a modest reduction of their earnings, is priceless.
What did you say when shiny gadget manufacturer #1 announced that workers had better learn to "run against the robots"? And when shiny gadget manufacturer #2 exploited underage workers in dangerous sweatshops in China? I haven't read any comments about "unions turning the IT sector into another Detroit" on this page, but instead I now learn that government regulation is in "the true spirit of America, because it's againt slavery". If selling stuff in Spain but paying taxes to the British Virgin Islands is not only moraly acceptable, but even a duty, because it's in the interest of the investors, then why would hiring IT developers from abroad be any different?
Capitalism is about making money, and that's it. It's not a philosophy, it won't make your lives better by itself. And rightly so. It is a government's job to ensure that the interests of those making money proceed in harmony with the interests of a nation as a whole; to which extent is matter of debate. When the government turns out as an expression of those with the most money (bi-partisan agreements...) rather than the choice of informed voters, we'd better learn to love the "invisible hand" and wait for its positive effects on the economy to trickle down on us.
Change, however it happens, should make things easier. It's not the case for Windows 8 (and 8.1). I'll tell a random example: a friend of mine had her Internet Explorer links retargeted by an adware to point to an ugly search engine instead of her default home page. Fixing the desktop links was easy: right click / Properties. Fixing the Modern ones? Either it's impossible, or finding how it's done was too hard for me, so in the end I resorted to searching for.lnk files in desktop mode and change them from there. Now that made me feel old...
But Google continuously updates Google Play Services on my phone without me even noticing, let alone the carrier or the device manufacturer approve and test the changes.
In the same way, they could update the WebView as well (hadn't they put it into a read-only file system, digitally signed by the device manufacturer). It's a userspace component with no implications on the phone service or the radio baseband.
In fact, IIRC the WebView can be updated through the market in the newer versions of Android.
The very same things can be said about Islamist terror. Ignorant people are being maneuvered by virtual caliphs who wish to become actual ones. Every human conflict in history can be reduced to a matter of "us vs them", with a "flag" motivation covering the real, always political, one.
I can't speak to Islam, but what I do know is that Christians who use violence to spread their views can not be considered Christians.
The quran, too, prescribes tolerance towards Hebrew and Christians. And christian holy scriptures contain incitements to violence, too:
Howbeit of the cities of these peoples, that the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, but thou shalt utterly destroy them: the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee; that they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods, and so ye sin against the LORD your God.
The place was subject to armed surveillance but the terrorists managed to slaughter the cops, too. Your sarcasm is therefore out of place, and anyway, choosing such an occasion for an attempt at gun propaganda shows bad taste and lack of compassion. You're not doing a good service in your cause, IMHO.
Google has a dominant position (among other places) in the browser market so site owners can't disregard their imposition. Saying that you can install other browsers would have been just like saying "you can install another OS" when Microsoft played leverage games with their near monopoly on the desktop back in the times.
Plus, Chrome tends to end up installed on the PCs of many unexperienced users because of their policy of aggressive bundling. So one can expect that a relevant portion of his site's visitors will be using Chrome in the foreseeable future no matter what.
That's because the law doesn't say "you can own guns full stop", it will say something like "you can own guns as specified by law", so lower-level laws can be passed to regulate the ownership of guns without violating the constitution. But no person or government agency can decide that you can't own a gun without having a law that backs their decision.
You are right in the fact that most constitutions, and probably that of the USA too, comprise some kind of exceptional procedures allowing the government to override the rule of law in the case of an emergency. I think that they're required in order to deal with those cases such as angry people with pitchforks burning down cities etc, something that still happened once in a while in the past century, but I don't expect those procedures to have been applied often nowadays.
You can't waive your right to state provided legal counsel: you can decline to accept one when you're offered, but you can't sign a piece of paper saying that from that moment on you won't be offered any if you get into a trial.
And I don't think people have the *right* to lie: having a right to something doesn't mean having the permission to do that thing, it means that there's some law stating explicitly that that something must be given to those who haven't got it.
Anyway, I was wrong in my post above: there appears to be no explicit law against entrapment, if I understand correctly it's just a matter of interpretation by the courts, which has oscillated over the course of years.
In countries under the rule of law, rights can not be given up. Just like a law cannot override the constitution, any piece of paper you might sign or be forced to sign cannot override the law. Not even in the case of the most obvious scum of mankind. That's because once you set up the principle that the government can selectively take away your rights, then the citizens can by the same principle selectively ignore the laws they don't like. Including those that define and give authority to the government.
The cost of building *everything* in China is at least 1/3, with well-known results, such as extreme pollution.
That the trade union of nuclear professionals advocates for nuclear power is unsurprising, grant me this consideration.
The wikipedia link that you pointed me to says that China has intentions to bring nuclear power usage to 6% in 2020 up from its current 2% whereas the regulated US were at 19% last year, and the hyper-regulated France was at 75%.
Conclusion: nuclear blossoms in social-democratic countries with a strong central government that invests large amounts of taxpayers' money as subsidies to the industry (or owns itdirectly).
And thorium reactors are nice, except that they have problems too, the biggest one being of course that they currently do not exist in a profitable form, while nuclear power fundamentalists regularly mention them as the obvious, current solution for every woe of nuclear power.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a nuclear power proponent myself, especially after I've seen the damages done by supposedly green energy sources and their governmental subsidy policies. I just don't like echo chambers.
The high costs of nuclear are driven by non technical issues.
If that were true, we'd be seeing nuclear power plants flowering under authoritarian regimes, whose leaders need not worry about public opinion. Or, we'd see them abund in turbo-capitalist countries, where rich people, or associations thereof, can buy legislation and will do so on every occasion when there's money to be made.
If the effective cost of nuclear power isn't limited to the bill of materials of the power plant and the cost of the finished, ready to employ fuel, it's because of reality, not because of tree-huggers.
True, but what about mid-complexity applications, such as office productivity or file management? I'm not convinced that modern (and Modern) UIs really make the "getting to know how to use it" part any faster for them. Why, when I use Office, I often find myself asking the web search engine from a Microsoft competitor about where the designers have hidden some function. For instance, in Access 2007 they hid document-relative actions amid the program-relative options inside what old-schoolers would call a "menu hierarchy" which was visually attached to a pulsating globe in a corner of the screen. In Windows 8, they went a step further and hid fundamental actions, such as "turn off the pc", or "put away everything that I'm working on and switch to the last Modern-style application that I have used", behind esoteric mouse gestures that give the user no visual clue about how to trigger them before he has actually performed them, and very little clue about what's going on aftern he's performed them (possibly by mistake).
Of course, it's also possible that I'm getting old.
at this point in time I'd advocate against Mozilla, Libreoffice, XFCE or LXDE to switch to GTK 3. They value their independence from GNOME too much.
My comment didn't contain any statement of value about GTK3 or GNOME, so I can't understand the rest of your message about being dickish, lazy, Enlightenment looking bad, me forcing other people to solve my problems, and so on. Perhaps you're talking in general about the attitude you perceive here on slashdot towards GNOME 3, but then if you do that in reply to a message of mine, you make it look like I said any of the stuff you're talking about. Which is not the case.
Which is why at this point in time I'd advocate against Mozilla, Libreoffice, XFCE or LXDE to switch to GTK 3. They value their independence from GNOME too much.
What's the difference between "I advocate against projects that value their independence from GNOME to use GTK 3" and "I don't want you to use GTK 3 outside of GNOME"?
It's not enough to download some files: in order to be susceptible to the attack, those devices should download stuff as root in recursive mode from a compromised ftp server. I honestly can't see that happening in reality.
(But then again I wouldn't believe that home routers could be sold with an internet-facing backdoor open by default in their stock firmware, until that happened.)
(cmake is probably the best, since it's more portable than autoconf).
As a user of autoconfed packages, I find autoconf superior to cmake. Packages built with autoconf have standardized mechanisms for uninstallation (a cmake package may generate an install-manifest file, an uninstall target, or none of the two), to specify where to put documentation, for cross-compilation, and to fine-tune the build and the installation. With cmake, I can't even tell the package where to install libraries (most packages will allow you to do it, but each package has a different standard about the way to be told); with autoconf, I can even specify a sed to be run on the name of the installed binaries (useful if different packages provide different implementations of the same binary) and still have the installed package work. Also, with cmake packages building both static and dynamic libraries at the same time is usually impossible.
Moreover, modern autoconf scripts are (relatively) easy to debug and patch when they don't work; cmake scripts are more scattered and they're written in an obscure mainframish language.
That said, I imagine that using autoconf on non-posix systems might be less funny.
Slashdot Mirror
Then have a closer look.
I can make a guess, by looking at the track record and the lobbying spending of the usual suspects, but still it would be more appropriate, in the name of transparency, to state explicitly whether the companies that we are entrusting with our personal information are a neutral third party or, instead, are patriots. So we can choose.
If you were using coreutils in your nightmare, you would actually have no problem: / /*, however.
(guys, don't do this at home, your rm implementation could differ)
# rm -rf
rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe
# rm --version
rm (GNU coreutils) 8.23
You wouldn't enjoy such protection if you typed rm -rf
Looks like my post failed catastrophically at communicating what my point of view is.
What did you say when shiny gadget manufacturer #1 announced that workers had better learn to "run against the robots"? And when shiny gadget manufacturer #2 exploited underage workers in dangerous sweatshops in China? I haven't read any comments about "unions turning the IT sector into another Detroit" on this page, but instead I now learn that government regulation is in "the true spirit of America, because it's againt slavery". If selling stuff in Spain but paying taxes to the British Virgin Islands is not only moraly acceptable, but even a duty, because it's in the interest of the investors, then why would hiring IT developers from abroad be any different?
Capitalism is about making money, and that's it. It's not a philosophy, it won't make your lives better by itself. And rightly so. It is a government's job to ensure that the interests of those making money proceed in harmony with the interests of a nation as a whole; to which extent is matter of debate. When the government turns out as an expression of those with the most money (bi-partisan agreements...) rather than the choice of informed voters, we'd better learn to love the "invisible hand" and wait for its positive effects on the economy to trickle down on us.
Change, however it happens, should make things easier. It's not the case for Windows 8 (and 8.1). I'll tell a random example: a friend of mine had her Internet Explorer links retargeted by an adware to point to an ugly search engine instead of her default home page. Fixing the desktop links was easy: right click / Properties. Fixing the Modern ones? Either it's impossible, or finding how it's done was too hard for me, so in the end I resorted to searching for .lnk files in desktop mode and change them from there. Now that made me feel old...
In the same way, they could update the WebView as well (hadn't they put it into a read-only file system, digitally signed by the device manufacturer). It's a userspace component with no implications on the phone service or the radio baseband.
In fact, IIRC the WebView can be updated through the market in the newer versions of Android.
The quran, too, prescribes tolerance towards Hebrew and Christians. And christian holy scriptures contain incitements to violence, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...
The place was subject to armed surveillance but the terrorists managed to slaughter the cops, too. Your sarcasm is therefore out of place, and anyway, choosing such an occasion for an attempt at gun propaganda shows bad taste and lack of compassion. You're not doing a good service in your cause, IMHO.
Google has a dominant position (among other places) in the browser market so site owners can't disregard their imposition. Saying that you can install other browsers would have been just like saying "you can install another OS" when Microsoft played leverage games with their near monopoly on the desktop back in the times. Plus, Chrome tends to end up installed on the PCs of many unexperienced users because of their policy of aggressive bundling. So one can expect that a relevant portion of his site's visitors will be using Chrome in the foreseeable future no matter what.
You are right in the fact that most constitutions, and probably that of the USA too, comprise some kind of exceptional procedures allowing the government to override the rule of law in the case of an emergency. I think that they're required in order to deal with those cases such as angry people with pitchforks burning down cities etc, something that still happened once in a while in the past century, but I don't expect those procedures to have been applied often nowadays.
And I don't think people have the *right* to lie: having a right to something doesn't mean having the permission to do that thing, it means that there's some law stating explicitly that that something must be given to those who haven't got it.
Anyway, I was wrong in my post above: there appears to be no explicit law against entrapment, if I understand correctly it's just a matter of interpretation by the courts, which has oscillated over the course of years.
In countries under the rule of law, rights can not be given up. Just like a law cannot override the constitution, any piece of paper you might sign or be forced to sign cannot override the law. Not even in the case of the most obvious scum of mankind. That's because once you set up the principle that the government can selectively take away your rights, then the citizens can by the same principle selectively ignore the laws they don't like. Including those that define and give authority to the government.
That the trade union of nuclear professionals advocates for nuclear power is unsurprising, grant me this consideration.
The wikipedia link that you pointed me to says that China has intentions to bring nuclear power usage to 6% in 2020 up from its current 2% whereas the regulated US were at 19% last year, and the hyper-regulated France was at 75%.
Conclusion: nuclear blossoms in social-democratic countries with a strong central government that invests large amounts of taxpayers' money as subsidies to the industry (or owns it directly).
And thorium reactors are nice, except that they have problems too, the biggest one being of course that they currently do not exist in a profitable form, while nuclear power fundamentalists regularly mention them as the obvious, current solution for every woe of nuclear power.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a nuclear power proponent myself, especially after I've seen the damages done by supposedly green energy sources and their governmental subsidy policies. I just don't like echo chambers.
The high costs of nuclear are driven by non technical issues.
If that were true, we'd be seeing nuclear power plants flowering under authoritarian regimes, whose leaders need not worry about public opinion. Or, we'd see them abund in turbo-capitalist countries, where rich people, or associations thereof, can buy legislation and will do so on every occasion when there's money to be made.
If the effective cost of nuclear power isn't limited to the bill of materials of the power plant and the cost of the finished, ready to employ fuel, it's because of reality, not because of tree-huggers.
Of course, it's also possible that I'm getting old.
In fact, it means "don't use GTK3 outside of GNOME", which is what I said.
No,
No? From the message:
My comment didn't contain any statement of value about GTK3 or GNOME, so I can't understand the rest of your message about being dickish, lazy, Enlightenment looking bad, me forcing other people to solve my problems, and so on. Perhaps you're talking in general about the attitude you perceive here on slashdot towards GNOME 3, but then if you do that in reply to a message of mine, you make it look like I said any of the stuff you're talking about. Which is not the case.
What's the difference between "I advocate against projects that value their independence from GNOME to use GTK 3" and "I don't want you to use GTK 3 outside of GNOME"?
https://mail.gnome.org/archive...
In Soviet Russia, trampling workers' rights gets you a monument, having a gay friend (?) gets it to be demolished.
(But then again I wouldn't believe that home routers could be sold with an internet-facing backdoor open by default in their stock firmware, until that happened.)
Hey, western engines don't blow up! They undergo rapid unscheduled disassembly.
(cmake is probably the best, since it's more portable than autoconf).
As a user of autoconfed packages, I find autoconf superior to cmake. Packages built with autoconf have standardized mechanisms for uninstallation (a cmake package may generate an install-manifest file, an uninstall target, or none of the two), to specify where to put documentation, for cross-compilation, and to fine-tune the build and the installation. With cmake, I can't even tell the package where to install libraries (most packages will allow you to do it, but each package has a different standard about the way to be told); with autoconf, I can even specify a sed to be run on the name of the installed binaries (useful if different packages provide different implementations of the same binary) and still have the installed package work. Also, with cmake packages building both static and dynamic libraries at the same time is usually impossible.
Moreover, modern autoconf scripts are (relatively) easy to debug and patch when they don't work; cmake scripts are more scattered and they're written in an obscure mainframish language.
That said, I imagine that using autoconf on non-posix systems might be less funny.