That's not the point. Only democratically elected governments have the right to legislate the actions of the governed. Any other government is illegitimate. The UN, even though countries join it voluntarily, has no legitimate right to create legislation for anyone.
The use of the UN to regulate the Internet won't, based on previous UN behavior, do anything at all to improve the health and wealth of poor nations. (Look at the Sec-Gen's loopy remarks yesterday the Internet.) But, it will provide some of their governments with another means to restrict the freedom of their citizens. Trading illusions of national dignity for personal freedom is a very bad mistake.
The Internet doesn't need government regulation. It needs agreed technical standards and the freedom of people to use it. People who want to regulate Internet content are simply using the Internet as an excuse to regulate content creation. It's analgous to governments 500 years ago claiming that they needed to regulate the printing press. I wasn't the press that scared them, it was all those books.
I don't disagree, but will say that Americans have always found the UN to be particularly ineffective, if not hostile, organization.
Remember, from the American point of view, the UN did little or nothing to defeat the Soviets. Instead, it kept trying to accommodate our enemy. Europeans would not be so surprised at Bush's treatment of the UN vis-a-vis Iraq if they would remember that, and the fact that Americans blame Europe for World War 1, fascism, communism, World War 2, the collapse of a corrupt colonial system and the abandonment of any responsibility to prepare their colonies for democracy (e.g., Iraq) and all the subsequent violence. Every European who complains about U.S. military strength needs to ask why it exists.
The world needs a migration of sovereignty from individual states to larger entities. Nationalism is the flipside of racism. My issue with the UN is that I did not vote for my representative there.
>> Are you saying that ICANN, that was created by the US government and still answers to it, composed mostly of white men from developed countries with capitalist agendas should have the authority? I don't know about you, but I'd prefer people who are a little more representative of the world.
Nope. As you undoubtedly noticed, I did not say that ICANN had the authority to regulate the Internet.
You're attempting to insert race into the argument, which I reject, as I do your attempts to insert economic theory.
If you wish to see an organization created with legitimate authority to regulate a global activity such as the Internet, then the only way to do that is to create a global democratically elected organization to which existing states cede a portion of their sovereignty. An undemocratic organization like the UN can never create legitimacy where none exists simply by appointing people of different skin colors and different ideologies to some committee.
Democracy is the only legitimate form of government that can claim to be representative, and it isn't created by fiat of unelected bureaucrats who themselves lack legitimacy.
Congress has authority to regulate the Internet within the U.S.. If I had a chance to vote for my UN representative, I'd have a different opinion about the authority of the UN.
I've no problems with capturing Milosevic and putting him on trial. I'll support UN actions when I agree with them, and oppose UN actions when I disagree with them. It remains an undemocratic organization that seeks to impose its will on people who are not represented in its deliberations: everyone.
The UN lacks the authority to regulate the Internet. It is a non-democratic organization comprised of unelected diplomatic representatives, a number of whom do the bidding of unfree regimes that want to block and censor the Internet. They claim to do this in the interest of preventing pollution of their culture by outsiders, but, in reaity, they are merely seeking to all possible means of internal dissent. (For examples, Iran and China.)
Because a book is more convenient, more permanent, and more trustworthy than the web. Before a book reaches the market, it is fact-checked, edited, rewritten, and revised. Most verbiage on the web, in contrast, isn't fact-checked, isn't edited, isn't rewritten, and isn't revised when it ought to be.
People get pad to write books; the web is full of ranting amateurs.
Re:Actually it's not a bad book
on
Linux Power Tools
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not only is there no reason to expect people to type "man cron", there's no reason for them to know that they can schedule tasks to run automatically at certain times. I suppose you might stumble upon cron after repeated use of apropos, but why not have the chance to read about it in a book?
Man pages are written for developers. Developers are the mechanics of the computer world.
Not An Introductory Book
on
Linux Power Tools
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's not an introductory book. The title, while not very helpful or decscriptive, is in keeping with a long line of 'power tools' titles targetting DOS and Windows users.
That quiblle aside, the book occupies a middle ground between the abundant "how to install Linux" books on one side of the spectrum and the myriad books for trained and wannabe admins on the other side of the spectrum. There's a market in that middle ground for books targetting Linux users who are neither newbies or admins, but simply people who want to learn a bit more.
Nonsense. The guy was making a weapon by copying known techniques. There's no reason to praise him for meeting "an intellectual and technical challenge". Frankly, he seems a bit challenged in the area of social responsibility.
It's incredibly naive to expect any government to allow any private individual to make military weapons that are not under the control of the state. Military and police power is a monopoly of the state.
He was endangering other people by asserting a bogus right to build a weapon. The right of people to avoid being targets for homemade weapons supercedes this guy's right to play with guns.
No. If you put me at risk -- for any reason -- I have a right and an obligation to stop you and eliminate that risk. The surest way to do that is to keep you from owning weapons in the first place, and making sure my side has enough weapons to defeat you if you do acquire weapons.
Expecting people to behave differently is equivalent to expecting human nature to change.
And in every other country in every other era I can think of.
The world isn't a perfect place. So long as people are prepared to use violence to advance their own interests, other people must be prepared to counter their violence in kind to protect themselves.
I'm not sure what you think an autonomous plane is, but it is irrelevant whether this so-called "cruise missile" bears any similarity to any other existing weapon. He was building a weapon and clearly indicated he'd like to sell it.
I don't know about you, but I really don't care much about someone's "rights" when it comes to weapons that might kill me. I'm in favor of my side keeping all the weapons. I'm am definitely not in favor of allowing someone else the freedom to express whatever rights they imagine they have if that puts me at risk.
People have a right to put themselves at risk to assert a belief, but they don't have the right to put others at risk to assert a belief.
What's your problem?! Are you assuming I think it is a bad thing for politicians to seek to eliminate private weapons? To the contary, I think it is just fine. I don't support people with a gun fetish who lean on the 2nd Amendment.
Tech point: How autonomous is this thing? What's the guidance system? Where did this guy get his maps and images? Or, did he?
Political point: On his web site he says he won't try to understand how politicians think. If he can't be bothered to understand why politicians want to eliminate independent sources of military weapons, he needs tocheck his grip on reality.
He sounds like one more presumptious and arrogant loon who thinks his moral dilletantism is reason to put others at risk. Good for NZ.
Of course, they're being critical of XFree86. The mere existence of Xouvert is implicit criticism. Also, who says the XFree86 origranization is "slow, bloated and more or less unable to keep XFree86 in a constant, modern state." What does that even mean?
I'm a user. I just want better software. I don't think I get better software when developers worry more about ideology and personal spite than implementing new ideas with good code.
Come on. You don't really expect MS to give it away, do you?
Seems to me a 25-cent royalty on something that sells for a two or three figure sum is cheap.
A lot of people in the open source community need to get down off their high horse and stop pretending that they're the first wave of some new utopian all-sharing and non-greedy world. They're not. People haven't changed. Most are still greedy. Most open source users would stop using it if it they had to buy it.
I'm surprised MS hasn't been licensing FAT all along, It's always been proprietary.
The license is so cheap that I doubt it will drive any but the most fly-by-night vendors into the open source camp. The cost of switching to a new format might well amount to more than the $250,000 maximum payment to MS. The per-unit license of 25 cents will be passed on to consumers,
Re:How Do you Kow What's Right?
on
Who Is An ISP?
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, you're being pedantic. More than 99 percent of the people sending email have no idea what you're talking about and no idea how to call sendmail directly, assuming they know what that is.
In the real world, a mail client is the thing you use to write mail, and a mail server is the thing that sends it somewhere else. Yes, there all always exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions.
Strong Passwords Stop Windows Virii?
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 1
Should we be allowing simple passwords?
How many Windows virii would have been thwarted by better passwords?
When most people think of security, they're not thinking of someone logging on. They're thinking about malevolent code.
Tog has a point. If smart people bang on a problem for years and years without eliminating it, maybe it's time to look at a different approach.
Consider what might happen if a national ISP laid on draconian and restrictive measures but promised "No Spam! No Viruses! No Worms! No Problems!" and actually delivered it for, say, $75.00 a month.
This is an all-too-common example of sloppy BBC reporting. Evidence of Earth-like planets at Vega has not been found. What's been found is a dust disk that conforms to theories that very large planets ormed early in a system's development will migrate to larger orbits, dragging a lot of debris that would otherwise crash on small planets and inhibit life there. (Still a lot of rocks left over to crash and burn, though. Take a look at all those craters on the Moon. Earth would look the same, if not for erosion.)
Good news, though, but not as good as imaging a small planet and getting positive results for water, oxygen and methane.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the point. Only democratically elected governments have the right to legislate the actions of the governed. Any other government is illegitimate. The UN, even though countries join it voluntarily, has no legitimate right to create legislation for anyone.
The use of the UN to regulate the Internet won't, based on previous UN behavior, do anything at all to improve the health and wealth of poor nations. (Look at the Sec-Gen's loopy remarks yesterday the Internet.) But, it will provide some of their governments with another means to restrict the freedom of their citizens. Trading illusions of national dignity for personal freedom is a very bad mistake.
The Internet doesn't need government regulation. It needs agreed technical standards and the freedom of people to use it. People who want to regulate Internet content are simply using the Internet as an excuse to regulate content creation. It's analgous to governments 500 years ago claiming that they needed to regulate the printing press. I wasn't the press that scared them, it was all those books.
I don't disagree, but will say that Americans have always found the UN to be particularly ineffective, if not hostile, organization.
Remember, from the American point of view, the UN did little or nothing to defeat the Soviets. Instead, it kept trying to accommodate our enemy. Europeans would not be so surprised at Bush's treatment of the UN vis-a-vis Iraq if they would remember that, and the fact that Americans blame Europe for World War 1, fascism, communism, World War 2, the collapse of a corrupt colonial system and the abandonment of any responsibility to prepare their colonies for democracy (e.g., Iraq) and all the subsequent violence. Every European who complains about U.S. military strength needs to ask why it exists.
The world needs a migration of sovereignty from individual states to larger entities. Nationalism is the flipside of racism. My issue with the UN is that I did not vote for my representative there.
>> Are you saying that ICANN, that was created by the US government and still answers to it, composed mostly of white men from developed countries with capitalist agendas should have the authority? I don't know about you, but I'd prefer people who are a little more representative of the world.
Nope. As you undoubtedly noticed, I did not say that ICANN had the authority to regulate the Internet.
You're attempting to insert race into the argument, which I reject, as I do your attempts to insert economic theory.
If you wish to see an organization created with legitimate authority to regulate a global activity such as the Internet, then the only way to do that is to create a global democratically elected organization to which existing states cede a portion of their sovereignty. An undemocratic organization like the UN can never create legitimacy where none exists simply by appointing people of different skin colors and different ideologies to some committee.
Democracy is the only legitimate form of government that can claim to be representative, and it isn't created by fiat of unelected bureaucrats who themselves lack legitimacy.
"and the U.S.A....."... What?
Congress has authority to regulate the Internet within the U.S.. If I had a chance to vote for my UN representative, I'd have a different opinion about the authority of the UN.
Agreed. Culture-ism, nationalism, racism are all the same thing.
Let people do what they want to do, and no one will need to worry about "preserving" a "culture", preserving the "homeland" or saving the "race".
I've no problems with capturing Milosevic and putting him on trial. I'll support UN actions when I agree with them, and oppose UN actions when I disagree with them. It remains an undemocratic organization that seeks to impose its will on people who are not represented in its deliberations: everyone.
The UN lacks the authority to regulate the Internet. It is a non-democratic organization comprised of unelected diplomatic representatives, a number of whom do the bidding of unfree regimes that want to block and censor the Internet. They claim to do this in the interest of preventing pollution of their culture by outsiders, but, in reaity, they are merely seeking to all possible means of internal dissent. (For examples, Iran and China.)
Because a book is more convenient, more permanent, and more trustworthy than the web. Before a book reaches the market, it is fact-checked, edited, rewritten, and revised. Most verbiage on the web, in contrast, isn't fact-checked, isn't edited, isn't rewritten, and isn't revised when it ought to be.
People get pad to write books; the web is full of ranting amateurs.
Not only is there no reason to expect people to type "man cron", there's no reason for them to know that they can schedule tasks to run automatically at certain times. I suppose you might stumble upon cron after repeated use of apropos, but why not have the chance to read about it in a book?
Man pages are written for developers. Developers are the mechanics of the computer world.
It's not an introductory book. The title, while not very helpful or decscriptive, is in keeping with a long line of 'power tools' titles targetting DOS and Windows users.
That quiblle aside, the book occupies a middle ground between the abundant "how to install Linux" books on one side of the spectrum and the myriad books for trained and wannabe admins on the other side of the spectrum. There's a market in that middle ground for books targetting Linux users who are neither newbies or admins, but simply people who want to learn a bit more.
Nonsense. The guy was making a weapon by copying known techniques. There's no reason to praise him for meeting "an intellectual and technical challenge". Frankly, he seems a bit challenged in the area of social responsibility.
It's incredibly naive to expect any government to allow any private individual to make military weapons that are not under the control of the state. Military and police power is a monopoly of the state.
He was endangering other people by asserting a bogus right to build a weapon. The right of people to avoid being targets for homemade weapons supercedes this guy's right to play with guns.
No. If you put me at risk -- for any reason -- I have a right and an obligation to stop you and eliminate that risk. The surest way to do that is to keep you from owning weapons in the first place, and making sure my side has enough weapons to defeat you if you do acquire weapons.
Expecting people to behave differently is equivalent to expecting human nature to change.
And in every other country in every other era I can think of.
The world isn't a perfect place. So long as people are prepared to use violence to advance their own interests, other people must be prepared to counter their violence in kind to protect themselves.
Risk? How about the risk of being the target?
I'm not sure what you think an autonomous plane is, but it is irrelevant whether this so-called "cruise missile" bears any similarity to any other existing weapon. He was building a weapon and clearly indicated he'd like to sell it.
I don't know about you, but I really don't care much about someone's "rights" when it comes to weapons that might kill me. I'm in favor of my side keeping all the weapons. I'm am definitely not in favor of allowing someone else the freedom to express whatever rights they imagine they have if that puts me at risk.
People have a right to put themselves at risk to assert a belief, but they don't have the right to put others at risk to assert a belief.
What's your problem?! Are you assuming I think it is a bad thing for politicians to seek to eliminate private weapons? To the contary, I think it is just fine. I don't support people with a gun fetish who lean on the 2nd Amendment.
Tech point: How autonomous is this thing? What's the guidance system? Where did this guy get his maps and images? Or, did he?
Political point: On his web site he says he won't try to understand how politicians think. If he can't be bothered to understand why politicians want to eliminate independent sources of military weapons, he needs tocheck his grip on reality.
He sounds like one more presumptious and arrogant loon who thinks his moral dilletantism is reason to put others at risk. Good for NZ.
Of course, they're being critical of XFree86. The mere existence of Xouvert is implicit criticism. Also, who says the XFree86 origranization is "slow, bloated and more or less unable to keep XFree86 in a constant, modern state." What does that even mean?
I'm a user. I just want better software. I don't think I get better software when developers worry more about ideology and personal spite than implementing new ideas with good code.
>> The intelligent device maker will simply go to the UDF or ISO standards instead of FAT.
Only if he can do that for less than $250,000.
Come on. You don't really expect MS to give it away, do you?
Seems to me a 25-cent royalty on something that sells for a two or three figure sum is cheap.
A lot of people in the open source community need to get down off their high horse and stop pretending that they're the first wave of some new utopian all-sharing and non-greedy world. They're not. People haven't changed. Most are still greedy. Most open source users would stop using it if it they had to buy it.
I'm surprised MS hasn't been licensing FAT all along, It's always been proprietary.
The license is so cheap that I doubt it will drive any but the most fly-by-night vendors into the open source camp. The cost of switching to a new format might well amount to more than the $250,000 maximum payment to MS. The per-unit license of 25 cents will be passed on to consumers,
Sorry, you're being pedantic. More than 99 percent of the people sending email have no idea what you're talking about and no idea how to call sendmail directly, assuming they know what that is.
In the real world, a mail client is the thing you use to write mail, and a mail server is the thing that sends it somewhere else. Yes, there all always exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions.
Should we be allowing simple passwords?
How many Windows virii would have been thwarted by better passwords?
When most people think of security, they're not thinking of someone logging on. They're thinking about malevolent code.
Tog has a point. If smart people bang on a problem for years and years without eliminating it, maybe it's time to look at a different approach.
Consider what might happen if a national ISP laid on draconian and restrictive measures but promised "No Spam! No Viruses! No Worms! No Problems!" and actually delivered it for, say, $75.00 a month.
This is an all-too-common example of sloppy BBC reporting. Evidence of Earth-like planets at Vega has not been found. What's been found is a dust disk that conforms to theories that very large planets ormed early in a system's development will migrate to larger orbits, dragging a lot of debris that would otherwise crash on small planets and inhibit life there. (Still a lot of rocks left over to crash and burn, though. Take a look at all those craters on the Moon. Earth would look the same, if not for erosion.)
Good news, though, but not as good as imaging a small planet and getting positive results for water, oxygen and methane.