Activating article 5 in NATO is probably Washingtons way of saying to their allies "we do not expect a peep about 'restraint' or 'respecting rights of poor middle eastern countries' if/when we decide to retalliate in any way we see fit".
You've got it backwards. The Europeans have invoked article 5 and offered any necessary assistance. The US needs only ask.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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Take actions to prevent the conditions that breed terrorism and show the people of the world that we pay more than lip service to the idea of 'defending liberty'.
That's the problem, see. For better or worse, the West has chosen to defend the liberty of Israel. I do not think it is possible to even become neutral by withdrawing from the world, since terrorists would try to extort "aid" for their nations.
Reign in corporate greed and globalization
Corporations do far more good for the world than religions could even comprehend.
For the US as for the rest of the democracies of the world, the only solution to this problem is not to be hated that much. And the only way to not be hated that much is to not act unreasonably.
Great idea. The democracies of the world should abandon the principles on which our nations are built, so we aren't disliked by nations of religious fanatics who make Stalin look benign. Get a grip. No matter what the Western nations do, they will never be popular, because we have principles, like human rights, which we champion, but aren't convenient for dictators and fundamentalists. There is one thing these rogue states respect, and it is strength. And if they don't respect, then they need to be taught to fear it.
I expect so. Gold, Sterling, Oil and Defence stocks will go up. Airline stocks will go down. Of course, that's all academic, the trading floors in NYC and London are shut...
I must admit, I gave into the hype and bought the first Harry Potter book. It was... okay, I guess. I was expecting something a lot more complex, though, and I was disappointed - it reminded me more of Enid Blyton than anything else.
Harry Potter is to children now what The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was to my generation. Having read the Philosopher's Stone (so far) I think there's hope for the next generation after all.
The fiction children read is vastly important - the generation that explored near-Earth space had grown up on Sci-Fi. The Victorian explorers had grown up with tales of adventure. It was fiction that got me into travelling for fun, and working in cutting-edge tech. I look forward to great things from today's kids.
Besides, look at all the junk snail mail you get every day, do you think that's going away any time soon?
The difference is, when you receive junk mail in the post, the sender pays. When you receive it in your inbox, you pay.
On my "public" mail address, which gets most of the spam I get, it actually saves me time to log in via the web mail interface, delete the spam, them POP3 download the real mail when I'm on a modem.
How the hell can Elcomsoft be indicted for breaking a U.S. copyright law when that firm is in RUSSIA!?
Because, as the article says:
ElcomSoft was culpable because it sold the program for $99 in the United States through an online payment service based in Issaquah, Wash., and with a Web site hosted in Chicago.
I honestly don't see why the slashbots are up in arms over this. If Skylarov had written his software and kept it to himself, no big deal. But he was selling software expressly designed to steal money from Adobe's pocket, of course they were upset. This is like someone inventing a device that can unlock any car, and selling it on the web.
Bottom line is, if you want people to respect your precious GPL, you had better start respecting everyone elses licences too.
Any Merchant who accepts credit cards already has a mag stripe reader of some sort.
Not true. Pay by Amex in a taxi in Amsterdam, for example, and the driver will use a device that imprints your card onto a paper form, which you sign, and the paper forms are processed off line.
For example, I put $50 dollars on my card. I can then go to locations that accept chip card purchases and I can make a purchase without the Merchant being on line.
That's amazing! I wish I could do that with $50 cash in my wallet!
Sorry to be sarcastic, but the point is, if you have to visit a station to "charge" your card with money, why would you bother? Why not just go to the ATM? The real advantage of a credit card is that you don't need to worry about how much cash you have on you, you have purchasing power up to your credit limit there with you, and you are protected by law (Consumer Credit Act, 1974) against fraud or even against faulty merchandise.
I can't see regular credit cards going away anytime soon, whatever authentication mechanism is used.
Microsoft has the advantage (and, rarely, the disadvantage) of being the focus of all media attention
Nonsense. It's hard to imagine Linux getting more hype/publicity than it does. It is given away on coverdisks of mainstream PC magazines, it has IBM backing it, it has hight profile companies (LNUX, RHAT) based on it, and it's now they height of "cool" to praise Linux to the heavens.
Your decision to use or not to use a Microsoft OS may be free of direct coercion, but it is certainly not free of manipulation.
That's true of *any* product, why do you suppose so much is spent on advertising Coca Cola (not a monopoly), Nike (again, not a monopoly), Ford (see a pattern here?) et al.
On the basis of morals, I can see no reasonable argument why the kind of coercive OEM licensing Microsoft uses should be allowed.
The OEMs were willing enough to sign those agreements when it was to their economic advantage to do so.
Monopolies run forever because they eliminate competition
Absolute monopolies are impossible without government intervention. For example, let's say you had the widget market sewn up, and decided to raise your prices. Now, one of two things will happen: either investors will realise that this is a high margin business and invest in (or start) companies that will compete, or the market will find an alternative, and buy that in preference to your widgets. In today's world, an alternative could be a very similar product imported from another market. Competing against an entrenched monopoly isn't difficult for a startup, because it is economical for them to tailor their products to a niche, something a huge producer often can't do. Once the startup starts to enjoy economy of scale, they can begin to compete with the entrenched company on price, too.
Of course, if your products are of high quality and good price, and you have a monopoly, then the market will not react against that - why should it? Monopolies aren't inherently bad, altho' in the short term, they can be abused.
The only way a monopoly can survive is if the government intervenes to prevent the market's natural response. And even that can't last, what good will a widget monopoly give you if the market decides what it really wants are gadgets?
The Free Market works. State intervention does not. Here endeth today's lesson.
to nuke, you have to be the 'email owner' and that means they send a confirmation to the from: addr and you reply back saying you agree with the nuke request.
The problem being, for example, that email addresses might not still be around. I was using an academic account in the early to mid '90s which either no longer exists, or has been recycled.
People say things on Usenet, as they do on IRC, with the expectation that it will not be around forever. That's one of the reasons both those channels are often used to discuss controversial subjects. If you say something in haste, or play devils advocate, it doesn't matter because it was expected to evaporate.
Now, there is the scope of massive out-of-context abuse of the system, what if you're 30 years old and you don't get that job because the interviewer searched google and found out that as an 18-year-old freshman you were an anarchist?
Google should honor all reasonable requests to delete postings from the archive (here is a list of email addresses I have used, for example). IANAL, but it might be better for them to do so now, rather than waiting for the first lawsuit.
But IIRC, you can configure sudo access to specific programs/commands, and can block access to ones that cause problems like this.
That's fiendishly difficult to do. Let me give you an example, what could be more innocent than the "cat" command, so a user can read the syslog for debugging? Well, "sudo cat" can be used to view or rewrite/etc/shadow, that's what!
The problem really is deeper, in the Unix "philosophy" itself. You're either uid 0 who can do anything, or a regular user. There's no notion of really fine-grained access control. Wouldn't it be great, for example, to be able to grant a group of users the right to bind to port 80 (for example) without having to be root in the meantime? Or to create a group of users who can start and stop sendmail/popper without being able to read mail spools? There's simply no elegant way to do this - the users/groups r/w/x mechanism on the file systems just isn't flexible enough. VMS solved this problem decades ago, but its access control lists (on file system objects and system privileges) never cross-pollinated into Unix, similarly processor quotas and many tuning parameters.
The only way to log what root does is to use a packet sniffer on a box that the root user does not have a login on, and physically secure this machine, and the main servers so they cannot have their keyboards accessed. In this case, even the use of SSH would have to be a "warning flag" that something suspicious was happening. You can't even rely on a kernel mod to track root, since the kernel can easily be replaced.
Damnit, teachers should be some of the highest-paid professionals in the nation and not some of the lowest!
When did you last hear of lawyers going on strike, or even threatening industrial action? What about doctors and architects? If a military officer is judged to be incompetent, they will lose their jobs. What if your accountant told you that it didn't matter if your books didn't balance, what was important was learning not to compete with other companies? What if a civil engineer couldn't make a bridge strong enough, so he went to the government and had the standards lowered?
The fact is, teachers brought their lack of status on themselves, by prioritizing politically correct dogma and covering up incompetence over actually doing their jobs. When they start acting like professionals, maybe society will start treating them like professionals.
They are covering all the equipment, raw materials and labor.
Those costs are trivial compared to the cost of the research and development it costs to create a new drug.
If the Brazilian government were really interested in the health of their people, why aren't they willing to fund their own R&D and develop their own drugs?
And do you really suppose politicians, with their bodyguards and palatial state buildings care any more or less about "the poor" than any corporate CEO?
This is no different from one country deciding it needs the resources of another - minerals, say - and simply sending their army to annex it. A classic example of this is Iraq invading Kuwait.
This is a cynical attempt by the Brazilian government, who are facing elections ins a few months, incidentally, to ride the anti-corporate "trend" that seems to be popular at the moment.
I assert that any piece of data, any idea, any
thought that I might acquire or synthesize is
something that I may use as I see fit, with no
restrictions on that action as such, including
sharing it with others or using it for various
purposes.
That's great, kid. Glad to hear it. Look forward to hearing from you when you've developed some groundbreaking theory, product or technique from scratch, with your own time and money.
If the drug is so simple to recreate that the government of brazil can do so without assistance from the drug's owners, so be it.
Everything's easy once someone else has done it first. Why did it take thousands of years for humanity to develop electrical power, when you can walk into any corner drugstore in the world now and buy a pack of batteries? Do you see where I'm going with this?
When did Brazil's citizens agree to go along with IP Laws?
Are you trying to say that you believe it's OK to simply ignore any law that you don't agree with?
We're already at the point where some serious Java apps are fast enough for everyday use, and I expect that to be more true over time as a) hardware continues to get faster and
Amusing that you make this point in support of Java, but were it Microsoft products needing ever faster hardware, you wouldn't hesitate to criticise them.
The catch is you have to specify the expected properties of your program in terms of logical language (yes, and this is very hard sometimes). If you stated the properties correctly, then our tool is able to detect violations against the properties.
Uh, if you have a logical language that describes what your program is supposed to do, why not just compile it? It sounds like what you're doing is writing the same program twice in two different languages and comparing the output - you would be better off with a code generation tool.
Now, Microsoft harnesses the other thing they KNOW about the user - the thing used to kill netscape. The user does not change his default settings. Most users never change their browser home page. Most users never install any new software to work with their browser. Most users never delete the icons that ship on their first boot screen.
So, Microsoft bundle things with their OS... and that's bad.
And Microsoft don't bundle things with their OS... and that's bad too.
Just wish these slashbots would make up their minds about what they want.
By that standard, there are very few sovereign nations, because there are very few nations that could even conceivably withstand a conventional military campaign against the United States
Defeating a country by defeating its military in battle is one thing.
Occupying a country and actually ruling it is a whole 'nother problem. The US has a powerful Navy and Air Force, and could probably blockade any nation, defeating them be economic means. All that achieves is... well, not very much. Look at Iraq, Cuba, Libya and Serbia for examples. The US Army is built for fighting armored battles under an air superiority umbrella. I doubt the US Army at present could even seal the border with Mexico to military standards without relying on the Air Force.
That won't help you in a long drawn out invasion and occupation, even assuming there was political support for it back home. If the US could have taken possession of Cuba, they'd have done it. The fact is that winning wars isn't just about blowing stuff up, it's about strategic policy goals, and no-one has "protracted guerilla war" on their "get me re-elected" list.
Slashdot Mirror
Activating article 5 in NATO is probably Washingtons way of saying to their allies "we do not expect a peep about 'restraint' or 'respecting rights of poor middle eastern countries' if/when we decide to retalliate in any way we see fit".
You've got it backwards. The Europeans have invoked article 5 and offered any necessary assistance. The US needs only ask.
Take actions to prevent the conditions that breed terrorism and show the people of the world that we pay more than lip service to the idea of 'defending liberty'.
That's the problem, see. For better or worse, the West has chosen to defend the liberty of Israel. I do not think it is possible to even become neutral by withdrawing from the world, since terrorists would try to extort "aid" for their nations.
Reign in corporate greed and globalization
Corporations do far more good for the world than religions could even comprehend.
For the US as for the rest of the democracies of the world, the only solution to this problem is not to be hated that much. And the only way to not be hated that much is to not act unreasonably.
Great idea. The democracies of the world should abandon the principles on which our nations are built, so we aren't disliked by nations of religious fanatics who make Stalin look benign. Get a grip. No matter what the Western nations do, they will never be popular, because we have principles, like human rights, which we champion, but aren't convenient for dictators and fundamentalists. There is one thing these rogue states respect, and it is strength. And if they don't respect, then they need to be taught to fear it.
And that, my friend, is the New World Order.
Will this affect the stock market????
I expect so. Gold, Sterling, Oil and Defence stocks will go up. Airline stocks will go down. Of course, that's all academic, the trading floors in NYC and London are shut...
Harry Potter is to children now what The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was to my generation. Having read the Philosopher's Stone (so far) I think there's hope for the next generation after all.
The fiction children read is vastly important - the generation that explored near-Earth space had grown up on Sci-Fi. The Victorian explorers had grown up with tales of adventure. It was fiction that got me into travelling for fun, and working in cutting-edge tech. I look forward to great things from today's kids.
you must therefore be mistaken about the public transit being better over there.
The T is way cleaner and more reliable than the Tube. Still, that's not difficult.
Besides, look at all the junk snail mail you get every day, do you think that's going away any time soon?
The difference is, when you receive junk mail in the post, the sender pays. When you receive it in your inbox, you pay.
On my "public" mail address, which gets most of the spam I get, it actually saves me time to log in via the web mail interface, delete the spam, them POP3 download the real mail when I'm on a modem.
Because, as the article says:
I honestly don't see why the slashbots are up in arms over this. If Skylarov had written his software and kept it to himself, no big deal. But he was selling software expressly designed to steal money from Adobe's pocket, of course they were upset. This is like someone inventing a device that can unlock any car, and selling it on the web.
Bottom line is, if you want people to respect your precious GPL, you had better start respecting everyone elses licences too.
Not true. Pay by Amex in a taxi in Amsterdam, for example, and the driver will use a device that imprints your card onto a paper form, which you sign, and the paper forms are processed off line.
For example, I put $50 dollars on my card. I can then go to locations that accept chip card purchases and I can make a purchase without the Merchant being on line.
That's amazing! I wish I could do that with $50 cash in my wallet!
Sorry to be sarcastic, but the point is, if you have to visit a station to "charge" your card with money, why would you bother? Why not just go to the ATM? The real advantage of a credit card is that you don't need to worry about how much cash you have on you, you have purchasing power up to your credit limit there with you, and you are protected by law (Consumer Credit Act, 1974) against fraud or even against faulty merchandise.
I can't see regular credit cards going away anytime soon, whatever authentication mechanism is used.
Nonsense. It's hard to imagine Linux getting more hype/publicity than it does. It is given away on coverdisks of mainstream PC magazines, it has IBM backing it, it has hight profile companies (LNUX, RHAT) based on it, and it's now they height of "cool" to praise Linux to the heavens.
Your decision to use or not to use a Microsoft OS may be free of direct coercion, but it is certainly not free of manipulation.
That's true of *any* product, why do you suppose so much is spent on advertising Coca Cola (not a monopoly), Nike (again, not a monopoly), Ford (see a pattern here?) et al.
On the basis of morals, I can see no reasonable argument why the kind of coercive OEM licensing Microsoft uses should be allowed.
The OEMs were willing enough to sign those agreements when it was to their economic advantage to do so.
Absolute monopolies are impossible without government intervention. For example, let's say you had the widget market sewn up, and decided to raise your prices. Now, one of two things will happen: either investors will realise that this is a high margin business and invest in (or start) companies that will compete, or the market will find an alternative, and buy that in preference to your widgets. In today's world, an alternative could be a very similar product imported from another market. Competing against an entrenched monopoly isn't difficult for a startup, because it is economical for them to tailor their products to a niche, something a huge producer often can't do. Once the startup starts to enjoy economy of scale, they can begin to compete with the entrenched company on price, too.
Of course, if your products are of high quality and good price, and you have a monopoly, then the market will not react against that - why should it? Monopolies aren't inherently bad, altho' in the short term, they can be abused.
The only way a monopoly can survive is if the government intervenes to prevent the market's natural response. And even that can't last, what good will a widget monopoly give you if the market decides what it really wants are gadgets?
The Free Market works. State intervention does not. Here endeth today's lesson.
to nuke, you have to be the 'email owner' and that means they send a confirmation to the from: addr and you reply back saying you agree with the nuke request.
The problem being, for example, that email addresses might not still be around. I was using an academic account in the early to mid '90s which either no longer exists, or has been recycled.
People say things on Usenet, as they do on IRC, with the expectation that it will not be around forever. That's one of the reasons both those channels are often used to discuss controversial subjects. If you say something in haste, or play devils advocate, it doesn't matter because it was expected to evaporate.
Now, there is the scope of massive out-of-context abuse of the system, what if you're 30 years old and you don't get that job because the interviewer searched google and found out that as an 18-year-old freshman you were an anarchist?
Google should honor all reasonable requests to delete postings from the archive (here is a list of email addresses I have used, for example). IANAL, but it might be better for them to do so now, rather than waiting for the first lawsuit.
But IIRC, you can configure sudo access to specific programs/commands, and can block access to ones that cause problems like this.
/etc/shadow, that's what!
That's fiendishly difficult to do. Let me give you an example, what could be more innocent than the "cat" command, so a user can read the syslog for debugging? Well, "sudo cat" can be used to view or rewrite
The problem really is deeper, in the Unix "philosophy" itself. You're either uid 0 who can do anything, or a regular user. There's no notion of really fine-grained access control. Wouldn't it be great, for example, to be able to grant a group of users the right to bind to port 80 (for example) without having to be root in the meantime? Or to create a group of users who can start and stop sendmail/popper without being able to read mail spools? There's simply no elegant way to do this - the users/groups r/w/x mechanism on the file systems just isn't flexible enough. VMS solved this problem decades ago, but its access control lists (on file system objects and system privileges) never cross-pollinated into Unix, similarly processor quotas and many tuning parameters.
The only way to log what root does is to use a packet sniffer on a box that the root user does not have a login on, and physically secure this machine, and the main servers so they cannot have their keyboards accessed. In this case, even the use of SSH would have to be a "warning flag" that something suspicious was happening. You can't even rely on a kernel mod to track root, since the kernel can easily be replaced.
Damnit, teachers should be some of the highest-paid professionals in the nation and not some of the lowest!
When did you last hear of lawyers going on strike, or even threatening industrial action? What about doctors and architects? If a military officer is judged to be incompetent, they will lose their jobs. What if your accountant told you that it didn't matter if your books didn't balance, what was important was learning not to compete with other companies? What if a civil engineer couldn't make a bridge strong enough, so he went to the government and had the standards lowered?
The fact is, teachers brought their lack of status on themselves, by prioritizing politically correct dogma and covering up incompetence over actually doing their jobs. When they start acting like professionals, maybe society will start treating them like professionals.
On the contrary, monopolies aren't even *possible* without government intervention. You're thinking of 'oligarchies'.
There are other ways to finance expensive R&D besides grantintg 20 year monopolies
Such as what?
no national boundaries were violated
What this really does is reveal the artificial nature of so-called "intellectual property."
Intellectual property is as much "property" as national boundaries are "boundaries".
Those costs are trivial compared to the cost of the research and development it costs to create a new drug.
If the Brazilian government were really interested in the health of their people, why aren't they willing to fund their own R&D and develop their own drugs?
And do you really suppose politicians, with their bodyguards and palatial state buildings care any more or less about "the poor" than any corporate CEO?
This is no different from one country deciding it needs the resources of another - minerals, say - and simply sending their army to annex it. A classic example of this is Iraq invading Kuwait.
This is a cynical attempt by the Brazilian government, who are facing elections ins a few months, incidentally, to ride the anti-corporate "trend" that seems to be popular at the moment.
thought that I might acquire or synthesize is
something that I may use as I see fit, with no
restrictions on that action as such, including
sharing it with others or using it for various
purposes.
That's great, kid. Glad to hear it. Look forward to hearing from you when you've developed some groundbreaking theory, product or technique from scratch, with your own time and money.
Everything's easy once someone else has done it first. Why did it take thousands of years for humanity to develop electrical power, when you can walk into any corner drugstore in the world now and buy a pack of batteries? Do you see where I'm going with this?
When did Brazil's citizens agree to go along with IP Laws?
Are you trying to say that you believe it's OK to simply ignore any law that you don't agree with?
Michael, SAP/DB is free, and transaction safe, and hence recoverable if the machine crashes. Might be worth checking it out. It's GPL, too.
Cheers!
Amusing that you make this point in support of Java, but were it Microsoft products needing ever faster hardware, you wouldn't hesitate to criticise them.
Xemacs does most of what you want, and you can script the rest in Lisp without too much effort. Apart from the GUI drag-and-drop building, that is.
And any Java IDE that accepts Beans as new components, with their Reflection/Serialization APIs, does the rest.
Uh, if you have a logical language that describes what your program is supposed to do, why not just compile it? It sounds like what you're doing is writing the same program twice in two different languages and comparing the output - you would be better off with a code generation tool.
So, Microsoft bundle things with their OS... and that's bad.
And Microsoft don't bundle things with their OS... and that's bad too.
Just wish these slashbots would make up their minds about what they want.
Defeating a country by defeating its military in battle is one thing.
Occupying a country and actually ruling it is a whole 'nother problem. The US has a powerful Navy and Air Force, and could probably blockade any nation, defeating them be economic means. All that achieves is... well, not very much. Look at Iraq, Cuba, Libya and Serbia for examples. The US Army is built for fighting armored battles under an air superiority umbrella. I doubt the US Army at present could even seal the border with Mexico to military standards without relying on the Air Force.
That won't help you in a long drawn out invasion and occupation, even assuming there was political support for it back home. If the US could have taken possession of Cuba, they'd have done it. The fact is that winning wars isn't just about blowing stuff up, it's about strategic policy goals, and no-one has "protracted guerilla war" on their "get me re-elected" list.