I have thought about it, and think there is no way to guarantee against tampering of he verification indexes. Even with cryptography, trust is implicit on both sides.
There is ultimately no substitute for the forensic tracability of a physical ballot. OTOH an anonymous ballot which cannot be sensed directly is no ballot at all... manual verification before submission is inherent in the balloting process.
You just said that a physical ballot must be printed in order for the machines to be trusted.
So I agree with what you're saying, except the general sentiment that software doesn't matter. If it doesn't print a ballot that the voter examines and hands to a polling clerk, then its bogus.
You are correct... perhaps the only way to tell for sure would be to compile the software on-the-spot after performing diffs to check for authenticity. Plus the OS and compiler would have to be verified as not being tampered with.
People--- Maintaining the integrity of anonymous transactions just isn't compatible with the nature of complex computing systems. Even fully-identified transactions, as in banking, are precarious enough to warrant an industry of anti-malware (which sadly, often cannot create a secure environment).
Add to that the idiosyncracies and exploitability of what is essentially Personal Computing hardware consisting of billions of logic gates and almost infinately maleable storage media... all to record a few bits of information per transaction?
That is asking for trouble.
Even if polling authorities can somehow effectively and independantly verify the source code logic, there is no way to be sure about the hardware logic, as each IC is effectively its own "Black Box" that cannot be peered into.
Finally, a computerized ballot is an invisible ballot. The bits being displayed on the touchscreen are only a proxy for the bits being recorded, and the opportunities for de-linking the display information with the recorded info are myriad. The concept of a voting system where the voter never actually sees the ballot they are casting is bizarre and tragic.
For the above reasons, only physical ballots can ultimately be considered as real. Any such voting system that does not print a physical ballot is a fraud.
Based on the information WHO provided?
on
Rumsfeld Stepping Down
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is not intended as any disrepect for your service in Desert Storm, but I have to wonder what counts as information "that's provided" in your world.
At least three months ahead of the invasion you could have already watched or read reports from a number of leading European, Australian, Canadian, and Asian news sources that the yellowcake documents had been determined by experts to be forged, the aluminum tubes were a mundane (non-nuclear) component, the hydrogen trailers were likely used for weather baloons, the long shed-things were not WMD facilities but used to raise chickens, and that the true report of biological WMD in Iraq was very old with subsequent verification during the Clinton administration that the WMD had been gotten rid of.
It's clear to me that when making a decision in 2003 you didn't try, but instead jerked your knee according to what was "provided" or put directly under your nose. Next time the war drums start beating, I suggest you and all the others who made the same mistake pull your heads out of Corporate America's newsy-tainment ass.
Ubuntu is no competition for SuSE, unfortunately. I tried Ubuntu for a month and had to setup all my laptop security by hand (firewall, Wifi WPA, VPN, encrypted disk).
The X update bugs also bit me, leaving me to manually correct xorg.conf multiple times. An average desktop usser would also have gotten stuck here.
Ubuntu grossly mishandled my disks: The firewire and USB devices that were plugged-in during install had to be plugged back in for each reboot... otherwise the boot process would fail.
The installer did not provide an option for local (versus UTC) timezone, forcing the system to UTC which was off by 5 hours. I had to edit a file in/etc to correct this. Most PCs default to local time.
Ubuntu never got the acceleration in my very common Radeon to work right, even with ATI drivers. SUSE (and others like Xandros and Mandriva) handled this 100% correctly.
Ubuntu tends to configure audio using OSS when ALSA supportis available. This is inexcusable... why should I not hear my softphone ringing (or not be able to place a call) just because a webpage with Flash is open in the background? Why should I miss appointments because the calendar alarm could not sound?
Also, why does Ubuntu have a special background process tracking filesystem changes (and using 20% of my CPU!) when other systems track changes just fine without this CPU-eating behavior?
IMO Ubuntu needs to stop resting on the laurels of APT and start fixing these amatuer-level mistakes and major shortcomings.
The classic profile of a polluted "superfund" site (at least where I'm from) is a parcel of land that used to be a corporation's private property.
Physical ownership doesn't deter pollution and other forms of environmental degradation, because the bulk of it is committed by large and impersonal industrial players; they don't care about polluting the company's (or the public's) land when there is no awareness or risk that punishment and cleanup efforts may result. These problems by themselves often don't involve personal short-term risk, so self-interest works poorly as a behavior modifying agent here. What matters most is whether the damaging activities in question are regulated by government, such that punishment and fines can be levied against the perpetrators... it is one of the surest ways to raise awareness (and levels of self-control) regarding dirty and dangerous activities.
We know the USA can already (and yes, that is a form of censorship).
But Russia, China, India, Iran, NATO countries...? Google is ultimately chartered by the US government, and can be commanded to do the government's bidding in times of war. One would almost have to assume that a preferential relationship exists between companies like Google and the CIA.
Unless you're a solar-panel inventor from South Africa who's name is Vivian.... then your groupies will arrive somewhat confused.:)
In all seriousness, the above article is highly recommended. Germany and SA are already jointly manufacturing a CIGS cell that is a direct competitor to the one mentioned in TFA.
Yes. And the fact that there is apparently a need for "more comprehensive" identity checking means Verisign haven't been doing their jobs.
Verisign suffered a blow to their credibility a couple years back when it was discovered they were handing out certs to phishers. This new "technology" looks like a ploy for them to repair their reputation by giving them the opportunity to slag everyone else who does not adopt their new scheme; And in Mozilla they found a juicy target.
I'm sure MS is happy to go along with it, seeing how its own reputation vis-a-vis phishing and general security is worse than Verisign's.
Truecrypt is a good tool, but it doesn't handle encrypted boot partitions on Windows (although this could be made to work on Linux using a custom initrd).
You might mean with all sincerity that the term only means "arbitrary discrimination based solely on any of the abovementioned categories", but the hole in your definition ends up corrupting the downstream political dialogue which depends upon these concepts. In this case, the logical result of the error is the substitution of authority for freedom; you've now implicitly postulated that there must exist something which determines what discrimination is "arbitrary" and then act to override that freedom when that individual chooses in a way you don't like. That crumbling sound you hear is the First Amendment eroding.
So then the interment of Japanese Americans during World War II wasn't arbitrary discrimination? Racist epithets and sexual harrassment in the workplace are just subjective concepts that an "authority" (say, a jury) has no place passing judgement?
Look at your very own argument and tell me that, by your own slippery logic, use of the term "newspeak" couldn't itself be twisted into an example of hate speech. We are talking about the way people talk about subjective things, so its all subjective and beyond anyone's purview to judge. Right?:-D
Hate speech is a real phenomenon. That is not to say that all (or even most) of it should be restricted. But it has to be recognized and noted as such. Where hate speech crosses the line is when it begins to advocate violence.
Under objective definitions, the distinction should be between "good judgement" and "bad judgement". But instead, you substitute the term "being judgemental". That is a step away from clarity. Why?
I didn't make the comparison in binary terms, as you insist I should, which makes it all the more instructive. A person can be regarded as being (overly) judgemental, or as someone who excercises good judgement, or any number of related qualities. A judgemental person will tend to overreact and look for trouble based on irrelevant personal criteria.
You may say, one person's irrelevance is another's pertinence... but society does have human rights standards (the conformity you so dread). And they don't take the form of exceedingly radical and narrow definition of free speech that Libertarians skew towards. Experience shows us that human rights often come into conflict with each other, and simply catering to the side that has paid for the loudest megaphone often makes things worse in ways that can be measured if not in hapiness then in the loss of actual human lives.
FWIW, Private parties can censor at will, with no messy First Amendment issues to deal with. Really, there is no more effective means.
And private censorship is what this thread is about, so there goes your strawman.
This Wikipedia definition of hate speech is instructive in this case:
"Hate speech is a controversial term for speech intended to degrade, intimidate, or incite violence or prejudicial action against a person or group of people based on their race, gender, age, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, moral or political views, etc."
The definition you are using is a reactionary oversimiplification of the term.
Similarly, "discrimination" in this context is shorthand for arbitrary discrimination based solely on any of the abovementioned categories (i.e. for no good reason other than someone belonging to an "out-group").
It may disturb you that educated people with divergent world views from your own can coin terms that shed light on inconvenient facts (like irrational self-serving hatred toward whole groups); But that does not make it some kind of nefarious newspeak (even when the term 'hate speech' is abused by both yourself and the oreo-throwers).
As for animosity, it can be a healthy thing if it doesn't consume, and has both a rational and humane basis. Which individuals we dislike or exclude ought to be based on the content of their character: their actions. Likewise, any individuals or groups acting against this ethic in favor of blind discrimination do open themselves to public expressions of disagreement and even (gasp!) hatred.
Its like the difference between excercising "good judgement" and "being judgemental". The latter is some combination of arbitrary, unnecessary and capricious (generally irrational and bigoted).
Looks like the future will be a battle between OLED, SED and this new laser technology. If the latter delivers brighter and more efficient projectors, I'm there!
As it happens, its relatively easy to setup SuSE with an encrypted root filesystem. That protects you from malware being physically placed on your system.
Preventing malware from being remotely placed on your system boils down to the usual Internet security measures (firewall, running only needed services, Firefox with NoScript, etc).
Thank you for that primer on Social Darwinism. Whatever your take on it, such a theory does not justify underhanded and anti-competitive behavior by a monopoly.
20) Virtual folders that unify two or more real folders.
21) File-change notifications
22) The WINDOW: device... create and manipulate windows as files. The parameters would be passed like: open("WINDOW:0/0/400/100/Window Title"); which specifies window location, size and title. Also SPEAK: could accept parameters for voice synthesis.
23) The whole disk-based portion of the system was located under one abstract assignment, SYS:, which could point almost anywhere
24) Each filesystem had its own root. The root of the current path would be accessed with a simple colon prefix (instead of VOLNAME:). The CLI would remember previous dirs and take you back to them with 'pcd'.
25) Escape codes could be used to draw bitmaps within console windows, although this was an unintended feature.
26) DOS had pattern-expansion that at the time was between globbing and regex in richness. Pattern support, as I recall, depended on the program intentionally passing the pattern string through an AmigaDOS expansion function which returned a linked-list of files. This has the advantage of not needing 'xargs' due to fileset size; but you had to use an xarg-like utility for certain commands because they did not internally support expansion (these few commands were written for single files, so these cases were rare).
27) A Unified bitmap and scalable (Agfa) FONTS: location, and I recall that rendering functions were later unified. This was more Mac-like and way ahead of the PC (which had balkanized fonts upto Win95). The bitmap fonts could be 32-color and also animated like GIFs. The first PC OS to handle loadable font-display through GPU coprocessing (the Blitter).
28) Each filesystem was 'bisected' with the allocation map and main dir in the middle of the partition, and each new file assinged to grow on one side or the other. Supposedly this kept head thrashing minimal in certain scenarios.
29) Most commands were 're-entrant' and could be configured to pre-load and link in memory to perform as if they were internal to the CLI. Since each command was equal to the parent CLI process, no process-creation or other overhead was incurred, and it saved memory and instruction cache as well.
30) Programs (apps) were often just the main binary plus the matching "binary.info" file (which defined the icon and params). Ones needing libraries, AV data and such were simply played inside of a 'drawer' (folder) to keep everything together, so installing a program often meant copying its folder onto your HD (wherever you liked) and install wizards were kindof rare.
31) CLI escaping and quoting were powerful but very clean, and much less likely (IMO) than bash to lead to misleading code (especially when pattern expansion was in the mix). Adoption of Unix-y features was very selective, and the OS as a whole was probably more true to the everything-as-file concept than a typical Unix workstation.
32) Event-handling in the standard devices was sophisticated enough that daemons were rare.
33) The core OS (scheduler+DOS) knew the difference between a thread, shell-bound process, user-facing GUI process, a handler/driver, and something called a "commodity" which is similar in function to OSX Dashboard widgets. Many tasklist utilities would display them quite distinctly as a result, and just show the apps by default.
34) Racter: 3rd-party app that combined an Eliza-like engine with an animated 3D metalic female face (circa 1986).
35) Diga! Also about 1986, a multiplexed VT-100 app that could (with two Amigas) transfer files both ways while chatting, with resume, CRC etc.
and...
42) Had both NIL: and NULL: devices that functioned differently.:-)
Sigh... Amiga was the Number 3 PC platform for a couple years running. That's a LOT of people and committment that got whacked with the hardship of migrating to other platforms (and the investment in time/money wasted).
Nearly or shortly thereafter, OS/2 also took a dive due to MS' betrayal of IBM.
Then, as you mention, there was BeOS.
NeXT would have been another casualty without Apple picking it up AND getting the MS 'sanction' to save its bacon.
There was a lot of excellent, sophisticated stuff that gained large userbases in the 80s and 90s, only to turn into a dead liability for all those users. I was an Amiga user, then went to Windows for a few years before Linux. But I still payed attention to all the other great stuff that became buried under proprietary phase-outs and lock-downs.
From this Gen-Xers point of view, RMS' contribution to free software is invaluable. Linux would just be *BSD without the yearned-for assurance of continued open user-access drawing so many coders who shared similar experiences.
I loved the Amiga hardware, but after about 1991 (with PCs discovering 'multitasking', sampled audio and coprocessors) that aspect of it got old.
What remained Amiga OS's big strengths were:
1) Real-time multitasking (not a big deal now)
1a) Well-developed support for proper vblank-timed animation (PCs painfully took many, many years to catch onto this. Animation without the 'torn' look was a 'frill' to PC users.)
2) Tight developer-community cooperating to ensure runtime stability
3) Inter-app orchestration through ARexx ports/scripts (and ARexx built-into the Kickstart).
4) The DOS filesystem semantics, where each filesystem was addressed by either its DOS ID *or* its volume-name. The latter could optionally prompt the user to insert volumes on an as-need basis.
5) Integration of desktop and CLI semantics: System utility binaries were GUI, unless called from the command-line. (No they weren't near huge.) CLI invocation meant reading params from line arguments, whereas GUI invocation simply read the params list within the invoking icon's properties. The param symbol-value pairs were easily edited from any icon's "file properties" window, and they could be flagged mandatory or optional. It was a great, common-sense way to tweak the system while staying within familiar desktop/filesystem paradigm.
6) Adding a new utility, driver, etc. to the system just meant dropping the file into its system drawer.
7) ASSIGNs:-)
8) Intelligent, named pipes that could handle blocking and non-blocking IO from the CLI (if you knew what you were doing), and had FIFO/LIFO modes.
9) Stream and block device semantics that had parameter-passing (ex: 'copy SER01:/g10/sPARITY To SOUND:/v50') including AmiTCP sockets.
10) DOS-level management of Classes and Datatypes: Drop a datatype driver into the system so that class "bitmap image" can now read/write new formats like PNG. Most apps did adopt this framework!
11) A CLI and DOS that understood dates, incl. terms like "yesterday" (instead of each command interpreting strings as times and dates).
12) Lots of sh-like scripting additions, like command substitution. Runtime system variables were accessed from the elastic RAM: drive, but mirrored to the HD when told to persist.
13) 8-second bootup times:-)
14) Apps and utilities always knew at least the basic Intuition GUI was available. No character/bitmap mode schitzophrenia.
15) After 1.x, GUI apps behaved like proper DOS entities: Compare to Unix, where a job-management signal like SIGSTOP will freeze an X11 GUI solid. (MacOS/Aqua does not suffer this conflict.)
16) The Zorro expansion bus (OK its hardware, but it was autoconfiguring like PCI back in the mid-80s).
17) Having users up/download/read simultaneously as needed on your packet-switched (pre-Internet) Dnet BBS, while playing sampled music files, while copying files between other drives, while compressing stuff at low-priority, while editing images on a 16MHz system without missing a beat! (If you animated hires+hicolor during all this, then you would see a slowdown due to DMA bandwidth being hogged). Certain top-shelf action games could also be played while heavily multitasking, but you had to experiement to see which ones would try to halt other processes.
18) No Swap!
19) We Amiga users got laid.
Comparied to the button-down, tight-polyester tuxedo and heavy orthopedic shoes of a "PC compatible", our Macs of the time were Art History 101 elbow-patches and loafers; an Amiga was like wearing acid-wash cutoffs while swinging on a trapeze with a complement of squirt-bottle acrylic paints. Other people thought it was a pacemaker for the early multimedia industry;-)
I know disadvantaged kids who grew into IT careers because they had an inexpensive Commodore or Atari at home. Including myself.
Bouts of social instability can sometimes become opportunities to become engrossed in your computer or books. Obviously, not Darfur or post-invasion-Iraq levels of instability, but still...
If the kids have at least semi-regular schooling and decent food and shelter, then the computer will be of considerable help to most of them. Anywhere a decades-old handmedown encyclopedia has made a difference in a struggling child's development, a networked computer will give them a current encyclopedia plus dozens of other benefits of greater magnitude.
One OS vendor (even if a monopolist) is equivalent to "standard computers", despite that fact that every other vendor (incl. Apple which is de riguer with journalists) offers rather high security.
Thats a pretty inaccurate way to talk down to their audience.
This is DELIBERATE and done as an incentive to release open drivers, or at least docs for others to make them, which can be incorporated into the kernel thus avoiding this hassle.
I kindof doubt that. Their attitude toward DRM shows they are willing to live with closed hardware and firmware, without any intentional thwarting of closed-system developers. I think the Linux gang are simply not willing to make interface committments.
Also IIRC a stable ABI would force various kernel structures to be set in stone, reducing flexibilty / preventing later improvements.
Only between major revisions, which might come every 5-7 years. That's primarily what major revisions are for: they are a special event for changing the interfaces, to the point where compatability breaks.
Ubuntu is too minimalistic in its 'control panel' options. There's too many things you cannot do without nursing those activities from the CLI. Ubuntu has no security features recommended on laptops: WPA, VPN, firewall, encrypted partitions, etc. Even home folders are not set as private. You must configure them all from the CLI or at best with afterthought add-ons like Firestarter.
The Ubuntu installer is complete amatuer-hour (no, really, it looks like a script that was whipped up in one hour): Instead of asking, it makes nasty assumptions like clock=UTC, and that your UBS/Firewire drives are to be mounted from fstab on bootup (when those drives are unplugged, your system *doesn't* bootup). Video card detection is often fumbled with common models like Radeon 7000.
I wish Canonical well with Ubuntu, but I'd say they'd better add a lot more standard features with a revamped installer in the next release (Edgy) if they want to maintain their standing.
Mandriva, SuSE, Xandros are all much better for normal PC use IMO. They always have been better, and even Xandros (was Corel) goes back to 1999.
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I have thought about it, and think there is no way to guarantee against tampering of he verification indexes. Even with cryptography, trust is implicit on both sides.
There is ultimately no substitute for the forensic tracability of a physical ballot. OTOH an anonymous ballot which cannot be sensed directly is no ballot at all... manual verification before submission is inherent in the balloting process.
You just said that a physical ballot must be printed in order for the machines to be trusted.
So I agree with what you're saying, except the general sentiment that software doesn't matter. If it doesn't print a ballot that the voter examines and hands to a polling clerk, then its bogus.
You are correct... perhaps the only way to tell for sure would be to compile the software on-the-spot after performing diffs to check for authenticity. Plus the OS and compiler would have to be verified as not being tampered with.
People--- Maintaining the integrity of anonymous transactions just isn't compatible with the nature of complex computing systems. Even fully-identified transactions, as in banking, are precarious enough to warrant an industry of anti-malware (which sadly, often cannot create a secure environment).
Add to that the idiosyncracies and exploitability of what is essentially Personal Computing hardware consisting of billions of logic gates and almost infinately maleable storage media... all to record a few bits of information per transaction?
That is asking for trouble.
Even if polling authorities can somehow effectively and independantly verify the source code logic, there is no way to be sure about the hardware logic, as each IC is effectively its own "Black Box" that cannot be peered into.
Finally, a computerized ballot is an invisible ballot. The bits being displayed on the touchscreen are only a proxy for the bits being recorded, and the opportunities for de-linking the display information with the recorded info are myriad. The concept of a voting system where the voter never actually sees the ballot they are casting is bizarre and tragic.
For the above reasons, only physical ballots can ultimately be considered as real. Any such voting system that does not print a physical ballot is a fraud.
This is not intended as any disrepect for your service in Desert Storm, but I have to wonder what counts as information "that's provided" in your world.
At least three months ahead of the invasion you could have already watched or read reports from a number of leading European, Australian, Canadian, and Asian news sources that the yellowcake documents had been determined by experts to be forged, the aluminum tubes were a mundane (non-nuclear) component, the hydrogen trailers were likely used for weather baloons, the long shed-things were not WMD facilities but used to raise chickens, and that the true report of biological WMD in Iraq was very old with subsequent verification during the Clinton administration that the WMD had been gotten rid of.
It's clear to me that when making a decision in 2003 you didn't try, but instead jerked your knee according to what was "provided" or put directly under your nose. Next time the war drums start beating, I suggest you and all the others who made the same mistake pull your heads out of Corporate America's newsy-tainment ass.
Non-profit distributions like Debian won't be impacted much.
Wrong. The deal means that any would-be contributors to Debian having a commercial Linux background are assumed to be litigation targets.
Ubuntu is no competition for SuSE, unfortunately. I tried Ubuntu for a month and had to setup all my laptop security by hand (firewall, Wifi WPA, VPN, encrypted disk).
/etc to correct this. Most PCs default to local time.
The X update bugs also bit me, leaving me to manually correct xorg.conf multiple times. An average desktop usser would also have gotten stuck here.
Ubuntu grossly mishandled my disks: The firewire and USB devices that were plugged-in during install had to be plugged back in for each reboot... otherwise the boot process would fail.
The installer did not provide an option for local (versus UTC) timezone, forcing the system to UTC which was off by 5 hours. I had to edit a file in
Ubuntu never got the acceleration in my very common Radeon to work right, even with ATI drivers. SUSE (and others like Xandros and Mandriva) handled this 100% correctly.
Ubuntu tends to configure audio using OSS when ALSA supportis available. This is inexcusable... why should I not hear my softphone ringing (or not be able to place a call) just because a webpage with Flash is open in the background? Why should I miss appointments because the calendar alarm could not sound?
Also, why does Ubuntu have a special background process tracking filesystem changes (and using 20% of my CPU!) when other systems track changes just fine without this CPU-eating behavior?
IMO Ubuntu needs to stop resting on the laurels of APT and start fixing these amatuer-level mistakes and major shortcomings.
The classic profile of a polluted "superfund" site (at least where I'm from) is a parcel of land that used to be a corporation's private property.
Physical ownership doesn't deter pollution and other forms of environmental degradation, because the bulk of it is committed by large and impersonal industrial players; they don't care about polluting the company's (or the public's) land when there is no awareness or risk that punishment and cleanup efforts may result. These problems by themselves often don't involve personal short-term risk, so self-interest works poorly as a behavior modifying agent here. What matters most is whether the damaging activities in question are regulated by government, such that punishment and fines can be levied against the perpetrators... it is one of the surest ways to raise awareness (and levels of self-control) regarding dirty and dangerous activities.
...on Google's satellite data?
We know the USA can already (and yes, that is a form of censorship).
But Russia, China, India, Iran, NATO countries...? Google is ultimately chartered by the US government, and can be commanded to do the government's bidding in times of war. One would almost have to assume that a preferential relationship exists between companies like Google and the CIA.
Unless you're a solar-panel inventor from South Africa who's name is Vivian.... then your groupies will arrive somewhat confused. :)
In all seriousness, the above article is highly recommended. Germany and SA are already jointly manufacturing a CIGS cell that is a direct competitor to the one mentioned in TFA.
Yes. And the fact that there is apparently a need for "more comprehensive" identity checking means Verisign haven't been doing their jobs.
Verisign suffered a blow to their credibility a couple years back when it was discovered they were handing out certs to phishers. This new "technology" looks like a ploy for them to repair their reputation by giving them the opportunity to slag everyone else who does not adopt their new scheme; And in Mozilla they found a juicy target.
I'm sure MS is happy to go along with it, seeing how its own reputation vis-a-vis phishing and general security is worse than Verisign's.
Truecrypt is a good tool, but it doesn't handle encrypted boot partitions on Windows (although this could be made to work on Linux using a custom initrd).
http://en.opensuse.org/Encrypted_Root_File_System_ with_SUSE_HOWTO
Thankfully not hard.
So then the interment of Japanese Americans during World War II wasn't arbitrary discrimination? Racist epithets and sexual harrassment in the workplace are just subjective concepts that an "authority" (say, a jury) has no place passing judgement?
Look at your very own argument and tell me that, by your own slippery logic, use of the term "newspeak" couldn't itself be twisted into an example of hate speech. We are talking about the way people talk about subjective things, so its all subjective and beyond anyone's purview to judge. Right?
Hate speech is a real phenomenon. That is not to say that all (or even most) of it should be restricted. But it has to be recognized and noted as such. Where hate speech crosses the line is when it begins to advocate violence.
I didn't make the comparison in binary terms, as you insist I should, which makes it all the more instructive. A person can be regarded as being (overly) judgemental, or as someone who excercises good judgement, or any number of related qualities. A judgemental person will tend to overreact and look for trouble based on irrelevant personal criteria.
You may say, one person's irrelevance is another's pertinence... but society does have human rights standards (the conformity you so dread). And they don't take the form of exceedingly radical and narrow definition of free speech that Libertarians skew towards. Experience shows us that human rights often come into conflict with each other, and simply catering to the side that has paid for the loudest megaphone often makes things worse in ways that can be measured if not in hapiness then in the loss of actual human lives.
FWIW, Private parties can censor at will, with no messy First Amendment issues to deal with. Really, there is no more effective means.
And private censorship is what this thread is about, so there goes your strawman.
The definition you are using is a reactionary oversimiplification of the term.
Similarly, "discrimination" in this context is shorthand for arbitrary discrimination based solely on any of the abovementioned categories (i.e. for no good reason other than someone belonging to an "out-group").
It may disturb you that educated people with divergent world views from your own can coin terms that shed light on inconvenient facts (like irrational self-serving hatred toward whole groups); But that does not make it some kind of nefarious newspeak (even when the term 'hate speech' is abused by both yourself and the oreo-throwers).
As for animosity, it can be a healthy thing if it doesn't consume, and has both a rational and humane basis. Which individuals we dislike or exclude ought to be based on the content of their character: their actions. Likewise, any individuals or groups acting against this ethic in favor of blind discrimination do open themselves to public expressions of disagreement and even (gasp!) hatred.
Its like the difference between excercising "good judgement" and "being judgemental". The latter is some combination of arbitrary, unnecessary and capricious (generally irrational and bigoted).
More succinctly termed Color Gamut.
Looks like the future will be a battle between OLED, SED and this new laser technology. If the latter delivers brighter and more efficient projectors, I'm there!
As it happens, its relatively easy to setup SuSE with an encrypted root filesystem. That protects you from malware being physically placed on your system.
Preventing malware from being remotely placed on your system boils down to the usual Internet security measures (firewall, running only needed services, Firefox with NoScript, etc).
Thank you for that primer on Social Darwinism. Whatever your take on it, such a theory does not justify underhanded and anti-competitive behavior by a monopoly.
20) Virtual folders that unify two or more real folders.
...
:-)
21) File-change notifications
22) The WINDOW: device... create and manipulate windows as files. The parameters would be passed like: open("WINDOW:0/0/400/100/Window Title"); which specifies window location, size and title. Also SPEAK: could accept parameters for voice synthesis.
23) The whole disk-based portion of the system was located under one abstract assignment, SYS:, which could point almost anywhere
24) Each filesystem had its own root. The root of the current path would be accessed with a simple colon prefix (instead of VOLNAME:). The CLI would remember previous dirs and take you back to them with 'pcd'.
25) Escape codes could be used to draw bitmaps within console windows, although this was an unintended feature.
26) DOS had pattern-expansion that at the time was between globbing and regex in richness. Pattern support, as I recall, depended on the program intentionally passing the pattern string through an AmigaDOS expansion function which returned a linked-list of files. This has the advantage of not needing 'xargs' due to fileset size; but you had to use an xarg-like utility for certain commands because they did not internally support expansion (these few commands were written for single files, so these cases were rare).
27) A Unified bitmap and scalable (Agfa) FONTS: location, and I recall that rendering functions were later unified. This was more Mac-like and way ahead of the PC (which had balkanized fonts upto Win95). The bitmap fonts could be 32-color and also animated like GIFs. The first PC OS to handle loadable font-display through GPU coprocessing (the Blitter).
28) Each filesystem was 'bisected' with the allocation map and main dir in the middle of the partition, and each new file assinged to grow on one side or the other. Supposedly this kept head thrashing minimal in certain scenarios.
29) Most commands were 're-entrant' and could be configured to pre-load and link in memory to perform as if they were internal to the CLI. Since each command was equal to the parent CLI process, no process-creation or other overhead was incurred, and it saved memory and instruction cache as well.
30) Programs (apps) were often just the main binary plus the matching "binary.info" file (which defined the icon and params). Ones needing libraries, AV data and such were simply played inside of a 'drawer' (folder) to keep everything together, so installing a program often meant copying its folder onto your HD (wherever you liked) and install wizards were kindof rare.
31) CLI escaping and quoting were powerful but very clean, and much less likely (IMO) than bash to lead to misleading code (especially when pattern expansion was in the mix). Adoption of Unix-y features was very selective, and the OS as a whole was probably more true to the everything-as-file concept than a typical Unix workstation.
32) Event-handling in the standard devices was sophisticated enough that daemons were rare.
33) The core OS (scheduler+DOS) knew the difference between a thread, shell-bound process, user-facing GUI process, a handler/driver, and something called a "commodity" which is similar in function to OSX Dashboard widgets. Many tasklist utilities would display them quite distinctly as a result, and just show the apps by default.
34) Racter: 3rd-party app that combined an Eliza-like engine with an animated 3D metalic female face (circa 1986).
35) Diga! Also about 1986, a multiplexed VT-100 app that could (with two Amigas) transfer files both ways while chatting, with resume, CRC etc.
and
42) Had both NIL: and NULL: devices that functioned differently.
Sigh... Amiga was the Number 3 PC platform for a couple years running. That's a LOT of people and committment that got whacked with the hardship of migrating to other platforms (and the investment in time/money wasted).
Nearly or shortly thereafter, OS/2 also took a dive due to MS' betrayal of IBM.
Then, as you mention, there was BeOS.
NeXT would have been another casualty without Apple picking it up AND getting the MS 'sanction' to save its bacon.
There was a lot of excellent, sophisticated stuff that gained large userbases in the 80s and 90s, only to turn into a dead liability for all those users. I was an Amiga user, then went to Windows for a few years before Linux. But I still payed attention to all the other great stuff that became buried under proprietary phase-outs and lock-downs.
From this Gen-Xers point of view, RMS' contribution to free software is invaluable. Linux would just be *BSD without the yearned-for assurance of continued open user-access drawing so many coders who shared similar experiences.
I loved the Amiga hardware, but after about 1991 (with PCs discovering 'multitasking', sampled audio and coprocessors) that aspect of it got old.
:-)
:-)
;-)
What remained Amiga OS's big strengths were:
1) Real-time multitasking (not a big deal now)
1a) Well-developed support for proper vblank-timed animation (PCs painfully took many, many years to catch onto this. Animation without the 'torn' look was a 'frill' to PC users.)
2) Tight developer-community cooperating to ensure runtime stability
3) Inter-app orchestration through ARexx ports/scripts (and ARexx built-into the Kickstart).
4) The DOS filesystem semantics, where each filesystem was addressed by either its DOS ID *or* its volume-name. The latter could optionally prompt the user to insert volumes on an as-need basis.
5) Integration of desktop and CLI semantics: System utility binaries were GUI, unless called from the command-line. (No they weren't near huge.) CLI invocation meant reading params from line arguments, whereas GUI invocation simply read the params list within the invoking icon's properties. The param symbol-value pairs were easily edited from any icon's "file properties" window, and they could be flagged mandatory or optional. It was a great, common-sense way to tweak the system while staying within familiar desktop/filesystem paradigm.
6) Adding a new utility, driver, etc. to the system just meant dropping the file into its system drawer.
7) ASSIGNs
8) Intelligent, named pipes that could handle blocking and non-blocking IO from the CLI (if you knew what you were doing), and had FIFO/LIFO modes.
9) Stream and block device semantics that had parameter-passing (ex: 'copy SER01:/g10/sPARITY To SOUND:/v50') including AmiTCP sockets.
10) DOS-level management of Classes and Datatypes: Drop a datatype driver into the system so that class "bitmap image" can now read/write new formats like PNG. Most apps did adopt this framework!
11) A CLI and DOS that understood dates, incl. terms like "yesterday" (instead of each command interpreting strings as times and dates).
12) Lots of sh-like scripting additions, like command substitution. Runtime system variables were accessed from the elastic RAM: drive, but mirrored to the HD when told to persist.
13) 8-second bootup times
14) Apps and utilities always knew at least the basic Intuition GUI was available. No character/bitmap mode schitzophrenia.
15) After 1.x, GUI apps behaved like proper DOS entities: Compare to Unix, where a job-management signal like SIGSTOP will freeze an X11 GUI solid. (MacOS/Aqua does not suffer this conflict.)
16) The Zorro expansion bus (OK its hardware, but it was autoconfiguring like PCI back in the mid-80s).
17) Having users up/download/read simultaneously as needed on your packet-switched (pre-Internet) Dnet BBS, while playing sampled music files, while copying files between other drives, while compressing stuff at low-priority, while editing images on a 16MHz system without missing a beat! (If you animated hires+hicolor during all this, then you would see a slowdown due to DMA bandwidth being hogged). Certain top-shelf action games could also be played while heavily multitasking, but you had to experiement to see which ones would try to halt other processes.
18) No Swap!
19) We Amiga users got laid.
Comparied to the button-down, tight-polyester tuxedo and heavy orthopedic shoes of a "PC compatible", our Macs of the time were Art History 101 elbow-patches and loafers; an Amiga was like wearing acid-wash cutoffs while swinging on a trapeze with a complement of squirt-bottle acrylic paints. Other people thought it was a pacemaker for the early multimedia industry
Queue up Bruce Springsteen. "Glory Days...!"
I know disadvantaged kids who grew into IT careers because they had an inexpensive Commodore or Atari at home. Including myself.
Bouts of social instability can sometimes become opportunities to become engrossed in your computer or books. Obviously, not Darfur or post-invasion-Iraq levels of instability, but still...
If the kids have at least semi-regular schooling and decent food and shelter, then the computer will be of considerable help to most of them. Anywhere a decades-old handmedown encyclopedia has made a difference in a struggling child's development, a networked computer will give them a current encyclopedia plus dozens of other benefits of greater magnitude.
One OS vendor (even if a monopolist) is equivalent to "standard computers", despite that fact that every other vendor (incl. Apple which is de riguer with journalists) offers rather high security.
Thats a pretty inaccurate way to talk down to their audience.
This is DELIBERATE and done as an incentive to release open drivers, or at least docs for others to make them, which can be incorporated into the kernel thus avoiding this hassle.
I kindof doubt that. Their attitude toward DRM shows they are willing to live with closed hardware and firmware, without any intentional thwarting of closed-system developers. I think the Linux gang are simply not willing to make interface committments.
Also IIRC a stable ABI would force various kernel structures to be set in stone, reducing flexibilty / preventing later improvements.
Only between major revisions, which might come every 5-7 years. That's primarily what major revisions are for: they are a special event for changing the interfaces, to the point where compatability breaks.
Gotta agree with that. SuSE is much nicer.
Ubuntu is too minimalistic in its 'control panel' options. There's too many things you cannot do without nursing those activities from the CLI. Ubuntu has no security features recommended on laptops: WPA, VPN, firewall, encrypted partitions, etc. Even home folders are not set as private. You must configure them all from the CLI or at best with afterthought add-ons like Firestarter.
The Ubuntu installer is complete amatuer-hour (no, really, it looks like a script that was whipped up in one hour): Instead of asking, it makes nasty assumptions like clock=UTC, and that your UBS/Firewire drives are to be mounted from fstab on bootup (when those drives are unplugged, your system *doesn't* bootup). Video card detection is often fumbled with common models like Radeon 7000.
I wish Canonical well with Ubuntu, but I'd say they'd better add a lot more standard features with a revamped installer in the next release (Edgy) if they want to maintain their standing.
Mandriva, SuSE, Xandros are all much better for normal PC use IMO. They always have been better, and even Xandros (was Corel) goes back to 1999.
Indeed.
So where is Linux's ABI for driver-writers?
Seems like Intel isn't the only one who is unwilling to make a committment here.