> Great, at least one moderator doesn't know what "noise" on a curve is.
Riight. A six year trendline that is flat is 'noice on a curve'. when discussing something that we are so lacking data on that no less a luminary than Dr. Carl Sagan was warning about GLOBAL COOLING on his (insert major award) winning Cosmos miniseries in 1980. Yes indeedy, I have the DVD box set, he said it.
Global warming may or may not be occuring. The evidence is pointing to slightly higher temps on a short term basis but we lack the precision in our existing dataset going back very far to say much more.
Is it a long term effect? What is the cause? (If it is an increase in solar output we will need a totally different solution.) Can it be stopped by Kyoto? (A question we really need answered to several significant digits of precision before we destroy Western Civilization implementing it.) Would the secondary effects of trying to implement Kyoto create even worse environmental problems? And so on.
> If you've ever lived, or at least spent enough time in a small town, you'd know that > Wal-Mart comes in like a monster (Super Wal-Marts) and disrupts the local economy to such a > degree that they manage to wipe out all other businesses, including most mom and pop shops, > grocery stores, mechanics, furniture stores, florists, gardening shops, day care facilities, > etc.
Maybe it is you that needs to visit a small town sometime. I don't visit, I live it. Population about 10,000 with perhaps another 10K in the drive in to town range. We have had a Super Walmart here for years and a normal one before that. K-Mart got run out of town along with some small mom & pop 'general merchandise' retailers almost instantly when Wally World first arrived. However we still have two grocery stores (both Brookshire Bros. now but still in two locations at opposite ends of town), a wide variety of auto mechanics, including a Quik Lube in sight of Walmart, several furniture stores, at least two florists (if for nothing else, because Walmart doesn't deliver; important feature in the florist business), multiple 'gardening shops'/nurseries and I really don't know where you get day care facilities because I have been in dozens of Walmarts and have yet to see one in the day care business. We also have a couple of pharmacies still keeping their door open, even after we lost one to Y2K issues.
> But how do you trigger a thermal alarm on a virtual machine (without access to > the "real" OS)?
If it is a P-IV in a 1U rack I'd suspect all you would have to do would be chew CPU cycles like mad for a hour. It isn't that hard, most of the first batch of P-IV chips ran so hot they will only run at their rated speed for a few minutes without some serious aftermarket cooling solutions. So there are potentially a couple million machines out there which are especially vulnerable.
> Wal-Mart has had this impact on developers and publishers for quite some time.
Wow, retailer has effect on producer! This is news!
Uh huh. Local affiliates have a major influence on the major TV networks. The TV networks have a big effect on what Hollywood produces, it isn't a 'perfect system' where the artists exercise total creative control over what the poor rubes in flyover country see in primetime.
Local car dealers have an influence on what Detroit (and Japan) produce. If they don't think the locals will buy em they don't order. Or more likely when they give their feedback on the proposed new design it is never built in the first place.
And now we are shocked, yes shocked to learn that retailers don't just tell EA "Oh we trust you guys, just send over a truck and a bill and we will buy whatever you put out." Doesn't work that way folks. Retail margins are slim, mostly thanks to WalMart because they learned to thrive in a low margin high volume world. This is generally a good thing.
I know hating Walmart around here is almost a much fun as the daily Hate Bushitler thread, but get over it already. If you don't like em don't shop there, if enough people vote with their feet they are boned, otherwise they will hang around and keep banking big sacks of cash.
> The exploit requires escalated privileges to begin with. The only thing it can currently > be used for is bypassing secure levels inside of OpenBSD, where you already have root.
People, think this through a bit and some more dangers appear. If root can replace System Management Mode there are some interesting possibilities for evil. SMM runs at permission levels beyond ring0, think of it as ring-1. From there you can escape any virtualization, any chroot jail, probably even escape from inside an emulator like VMWare if you can manage to execute the exploit without the emulation catching it and simulating it. Until this is completely understood and fixed, Xen, usermode linux, chroot and possibly VMWare/VirtualPC should be suspect.
Now imagine just how many people have root access to their virtual server at a hosting company and how many other users are running on the same physical hardware secure in the belief that their customer information is safe. But is it?
> I don't think I can bear to read the following hundreds of ignorant "I've > heard it's all due to the sun getting hotter" crap we always get on Slashdot > AGW stories.
Right, your religious faith sustains you through anything, especially anything as puny as logic or facts that don't support your beliefs. Dude, anybody that belives Global Warming is both a) established as a fact beyond debate and b) that the CAUSE of such warming is also established beyond debate is an ignorant savage deserving of exactlt the same attention of reasoning beings as Pat Robertson, Usama Bin Laden and the rest of the religious fanatics bedeviling the civilized world.
The sun IS burning hotter. NASA is detecting upward temperature trends on Mars and I really don't think that is amendable to human intervention. The temprature on Mars doesn't depend on our CO2 emission levels, whether or not you drive a hybrid car or if we ratify the Kyoto Treaty.
We desperately need to get the religion and green politics out of our science so we can answer the questions that matter. Is the earth warming? Is it cyclic? If it is dangerous to us and our civilization, what are the options for solving the problems? For instance, assume the Earth is warming in a non-cyclic pattern. Is the answer to destroy industrialized civilization in order to save it or is it possible to use our science to offset the bad effects?
But to the small minded intolerant political types like yourself there are no questions and the answer was the same as before the reason was global warming. To a socialist the answer to every problem is always more socialism. Global Warming is just this week's excuse because you guys decided fear might sell better than greed and class envy.
>...their package manager (too much dependency hell)....
You are either basing that on five year old experiences (which were horrible, I was there too) or not using the right tool for the job. These days only real propeller spinners need to manually invoke rpm. Up2Date and Yum take all the dependecy hell out of package manangement. Using rpm manually in this day would make about as much sense as a Debian user using dpkg manually instead of apt-get.
And no, apt-get isn't the answer despite people continuing to attempt to hammer it into RH based distros. As long as you stick to i386 it sorta works but it doesn't deal with bi-arch at all so if you load up an x86_64 machine you will soon have to abandon apt. Yum and Up2Date work though.
Thousands and thousands of bills are introduced in legislatures around the US and worldwide it is probably a million or more. Far fewer pass and even fewer of those make it th erest of the way into becoming a law. (For the civics challenged/non-US readers: In most US states it will also need a sponsor in the other legislative body, passage in both bodies and either signing into law by the Governor or another vote to override a veto.)
It is good that such an idea is starting to bubble up, but it has yet to pass into law ANYWHERE at this point. The political power, wealth and proven tendency to resort to outright illegal measures of the Foe is going to make this a long difficult struggle.
> Find me a "super free" replacement for Java and C and I'll stop
Dude, you need to read closer. I was offtopic on a rant against OO in general with my plea for a modernized procedural language. Java isn't fit to be mentioned in the same breath with C at any rate. Java is more like Turbo Pascal or Visual Basic, something budding programmers write freeware (And usually not Free Software although there are notable exceptions) with or corporations write massive but essentially uncomplicated applications in because hordes of cheap semi skilled labor can crank out code that isn't particularly well written but is protected by the runtime from the worst programming errors.
As for Free replacements for Java, how about mono, PHP, Perl, Python, C++, Objective C, etc. I think there is even a Free Turbo Pascal/Delphi clone you could look at. All available now, and all currently being used to create "secure, stable, line-of-business, database-driven applications" unlike GCJ that is still mostly under development and unsuitable for most production work.
> The GNU project built the GNU operating system and combined with the Linux kernel, it > makes the GNU/Linux operating system. It's really not a bad idea, you know.
No, GNU never built an operating system. They built a lot of really useful parts but have never assembled them into an operating system. On the day they do that final part we will at last have GNU. Not GNU/Linux, GNU. The FSF could have taken the freely redistributable Linux kernel and integrated it into a finished GNU, they chose not to. Only a year or so after Linux became popular the BSD kernel emerged from it's legal dispute. The FSF could have used it to complete GNU, they chose not to do so. The FSF could have done whatever it took to get HURD to a 1.0 version and thus completed GNU, again they chose differently.
Instead dozens of independent organizations (RedHat, Slackware, Debian, SUSE, Yggdrasil, etc, most now defunct) took all of the parts (including a non-GNU libc for the first several years) and did the hard work of integrating all the various parts (including a buttload of stuff that didn't come from the FSF, like X) and made a family of related operating systems. None of these are GNU. RedHat is not GNU. Debian was under the auspices of the FSF for a couple of years but still both parties chose NOT to call it GNU instead of Debian. But had they wished to co-brand it would have been GNU/Debian, Debian GNU or GNU/Debian Linux, but calling it Debian GNU/Linux is an incorrect usage of Mr. Torvalds trademark (even if not registered as a legal trademark at the time). Merging GNU and Linux with a / implies they are related however Linux is not under the auspices of the GNU project or the FSF.
> I'll give two reasons... one, as RMS states, Linus is not especially sympathetic to > the free software movement - this means people hearing 'Linux' never get to hear about > free software.
Tough noogies. Linus isn't the one who chooses the names of distributions any more than RMS can. RedHat could call their product RedHat OS, or could have paid for the trademark and certification testing and called it RedHat UNIX. Or anything else they wanted to. It was THEIR choice (subject to Linus's agreement regarding his trademark rights to the term 'linux') what to name their product. Same with Debian or SUSE. Just as a guess I'd say they all include "Linux" in their name because they feel customers will associate it in a positive way, something that wouldn't be true with GNU as only the already converted know much about it.
Why? Care to explain why the Free Software world needs Java? The FSF is working on cloning it solely because ignorant people built up a lot of otherwise Free infrastructure on Java either not knowing it wasn't Free or not caring. Much like the early days of KDE where they just didn't care about QT being closed source, forcing RedHat to put up the money to help the FSF launch GNOME so as to avert a disaster. And now we have RedHat and the FSF working to clean up other people's mess over the Java fiasco.
Java (and.NET/mono for that matter) are totally unneeded in the Free world, we get write once run anywhere from autoconf/automake not some crappy bytecode emulator for closed binaries.
Just to be clear, I'm dissing Java the platform and mono the platform, not Java and C# the languages. Both are perfectly acceptable languages for those into the OO thing. Me, I'm a total neolithic curmudgeon who is still unconvinced of the utility of OO. Find me a non-trivial OO program that isn't several times the size in code, runtime image, cpu cycles and development time compared to an equivalent procedural program. And as for code reuse, a C library is about the ultimate in that department.
What I'd like to see is a new procedural language taking most of C except replacing the zero terminated strings with something sane and including a garbage collecting string library. Fix some of the other bits that made sense in the dark ages of limited ram/cpu but leave the essence intact.
> Since it is possible to flash the BIOS from within a client OS, I'd say it is not > impossible to reach the point some day where an infected machine has to be junked.
Only if you are the sort of irresponsible idiot who would run Windows in a secure location in the first place. Security aware types seek out motherboards with protections against such foolishness. Either a jumper to disallow all writes or a BIOS option to lock out writes after POST and a facility in the BIOS itself to update itself from a floppy.
Now the other reply to your post, about the possibility for a future Windows malware to drop a rootkit into any Linux partitions on a dual boot machine, is a frightening possibility. Will be real fun when one infests dual boot Apples.
Microsoft sees VMWare as their enemy because they are banking cash today. (Thou shalt have no other vendors other than Microsoft) However Xen is probably the bigger threat. And I'd say they understand that as well, otherwise they could have done the one thing that would have made an instant difference.
Remember that when Xen was a research project at a university they had XP running in Xen because they had a source license for XP. However since said license didn't allow actually releasing anything derived from knowledge gained from that source they couldn't release the XP client drivers. Had Microsoft removed that restriction or, even better, provided Microsoft supported drivers Xen would likely crush VMWare in a few short years.
No, just a realistic appraisal of the legal and political climate in the US, as observed by a native who has followed politics for longer than the average slashdotter has been potty trained. I'm not even a crazed leftwing moonbat who sees a police state hiding under every rock, I'm a libertarian leaning small government Republican. But I know what Congress is capable of though, and have to speak out even when it would be Republicans leading the charge.
The only thing that keeps the trial lawyers at bay now is the reality that there IS no effective way to keep objectional content in a dank corner of the Internet so you can't sue every time your little hellion sees something naughty and our 1st Amendment won't allow the whole Internet (as viewed in the US) to become a big freaking Barney masturbertorium. But you give em a.xxx TLD and everything outside it that isn't Disney's version of reality will get their butts sued. And if you don't believe Congress won't force the default position of the ISP filters the second they would A) be affordable and B) effective hasn't been following the continual efforts of Congress to 'protect the children' from the 'evil, wicked and outright depraved Internet.'
If we just have to have a segregated Internet create.kids and force disney.com into it.
> I guess the main argument is that it should be fairly trivial to filter out any domain ending in.xxx,
Which is why it must never be allowed to be brought into existance. Listen up a second before that inflamatory slashdot article turns this thread into today's two minute hate.
If a.xxx domain is ever created the legal climate in the US will force any content that isn't 'child safe' into it. All it would take is one threat of a lawsuit from a rapacious trial lawyer (and we have a couple million of those monsters lurking here) and any site that wasn't perfectly safe for kiddies would move. Combine that with the law that would shamble out of Congress within a year or two of.xxx going live that would require every ISP to filter.xxx by default for new customers (to protect the 'precious innocent children' of course) and we would see an Internet as locked down as China. Just filtering different stuff, but counted by sites almost certainly more and counted by sites that are useful about as many.
No these scam artists won't have to force people into.xxx, the lawyers will do that part for them free of charge. That is why.xxx is a terrible idea, once it exists porn outside of it will find itself liable for every kiddie who wanders in 'by accident' and every backwoods community who finds its 'community standards' violated. Then once all of the porn is safely contained in.xxx every company will block it and every ISP will offer to block it. Then a few years later all the ISPs will block it by default and only open it up by request, this after Congress passes yet another law 'to protect the children.'
And of course the definition of what is 'porn' will change until eventually anything that isn't 'child safe' will be forced to relocate to escape the lawyers. So no,.xxx is not a good idea.
> The US Constitution is a "baseline" as far as rights go.
That certainly wasn't how it was seen at the time it was ratified. For example the 1st Amendment forbids the establishment of a State Religion, something many of the individual States had.
> If people have a right to free speech, and money is speech, doesn't that mean that the > arguments of those in favor of forcing broadcasters to give airtime to people without > compensation are valid?
Someone is confusing Presses and Attorneys. You have the right to an attorney, if you can not afford one, one will be provided for you. On the other hand, while you also have the Right to a Free Press, A Press will not be provided to you for Free. However if you can afford 10.95/mo for Netzero and $100 for an old beatup Dell you CAN bitch on Slashdot or Daily Kos all you want.
And class, what can be learn from this? Presses are valuable, we don't just give them to any crackpot who demands one. Attorneys on the other hand are worthless pieces of crap we give away for free to any old spammer or pedophile.
> For example, confiscating land for "public use" is quite clear and is vastly different > than "private use that might ultimately provide some public good." It didn't take much for > 95% of the population to agree on that after the travesty that was the Kelo ruling.
Actually Kelo was a good example of strict constructionism at work. The 'good guys', as opposed to the nimrods who yank new laws fully formed from their asses, on the court ruled against an outcome they clearly would have preferred and stuck to the law as written. The state constituition in question clearly permitted the action and the US Consitituition as a general rule only limits what the US Government can do. So they upheld the taking and noted that if the state laws were different they would have ruled differently, whereupon the outraged folks in the various states looked at their local laws and are in the process of making changes where needed.
> The latest and most significant restrictions were passed by a Republican-controlled House > and Democratic-controlled Senate, signed by a Democratic President, and approved by a > split Supreme Court.
No, the first real 'campaign finance laws' were passed by Democrats in the aftermath of Watergate. This latest batch was rammed by Sen McCain(RINO-AZ), Sen Feingold(D-WI), and the MSM(D). Signed by a sometimes conservative President Bush(R) who stated that it was his belief that it was unconstituitional but knew the months of acrimony a veto would bring would distract from a fairly important War he was kinda preoccupied with. (Not that I absolve Shrubbie, he violated his Oath of Office by signing it just as much as McCain or Feingold for sponsoring it.) Then the usual suspects on the Supreme Court ignored the 1st Amendment and upheld it. And amazingly the Democratic machine was all prepped and ready to roll around McCain Feingold with an extensive network of 527 organizations. Guess we now know why they were really for it. And of course a lot of Republican incumbents saw it as a positive for themselves, which was why they were so easy to steamroll into supporting it.
Reducing the amount of money in politics only serves to increase the power of incumbency. Being an incumbent gets you plenty of free press coverage.
> On television and radio, you can buy advertising time to the exclusion of the other party.
In theory perhaps, but in reality I doubt it would ever be a problem. If one side was so well funded it could afford to replace most television programming with campaign infomercials, outbidding the opposing camp for the time no less, then it is a virtual certainty that side is probably going to carry the day some election time. Sorry if that offends your egalitarian sensibilities but that is reality for you.
> Conclusion: Internet like speech. Television, radio unlike speech. Hence the reason the > FEC regulates certain things and not others.
Ok, and explain the FEC's justification for regulating billboards, newspaper advertising, magazine advertising, direct mail campaigns, Internet banner adverstising, phone banks, door to door campaigning, floating blimps carrying a message, yard signs, etc, etc. I won't hold my breath waiting, because there isn't any justification other than the side in power at the time thought the regulation would help their candidates get elected.
> You do not have a first ammendment right to give money to your candidate for the very > reason that Money IS speech.
Wow, that is doublethink of a quality not seen (other than as deliberate satire) outside of Daily Kos. You admit that money IS speech yet somehow in the same breath claim that makes it speech NOT protected by the 1st Amendment. Sorry, if it is speech then "Congress shall make NO law...."
Yes, some people, some causes, will have more money than other people or causes. Some political movements will have more wealthy donors within it, some will have more rabid volunteers, others will have famous people who can act as effective spokesmen for their causes. Yet so long as all are men[1] are equal before the law, all have but one vote and all may speak freely without fear of government reprisal then we have a free and fair political process.
[1] The word 'men' as used here isn't meant to imply women don't have the same rights, just refusing to bow to political correctness and use tortured language constructs to get around English's historical artifacts.
> But the Libertarian notion that you can eliminate the influence of money in politics is no > less naive than the Marxist assumption that a dictatorship of the proletariat will gave way > to an egalitarian state.
You assume we WANT to eliminate the influence of money. Not at all, we couldn't care less. Speech == money, money == speech, the two are interchangable and the more of both the better. As a nation we currently spend less electing a POTUS than deciding Coke vs. Pepsi or Tastes Great vs Less Filling.. As a voter I couldn't care less if a candidate is getting a crapload of money to buy advertising with. I do care WHERE the crapload of money is coming from. If it is from people and/or organizations I don't agree with it counts against the candidate, but if the contributions are politically/philosophically in sync my my own views I'd think it was great.
But the notion that regulating money isn't regulating speech requires Newthink. Other than standing on a soapbox in the park, any political speech has a cost in cash. Regulating the flow of cash by definition regulates the free flow of political speech.
Slashdot Mirror
> Great, at least one moderator doesn't know what "noise" on a curve is.
Riight. A six year trendline that is flat is 'noice on a curve'. when discussing something that we are so lacking data on that no less a luminary than Dr. Carl Sagan was warning about GLOBAL COOLING on his (insert major award) winning Cosmos miniseries in 1980. Yes indeedy, I have the DVD box set, he said it.
Global warming may or may not be occuring. The evidence is pointing to slightly higher temps on a short term basis but we lack the precision in our existing dataset going back very far to say much more.
Is it a long term effect? What is the cause? (If it is an increase in solar output we will need a totally different solution.) Can it be stopped by Kyoto? (A question we really need answered to several significant digits of precision before we destroy Western Civilization implementing it.) Would the secondary effects of trying to implement Kyoto create even worse environmental problems? And so on.
> If you've ever lived, or at least spent enough time in a small town, you'd know that
> Wal-Mart comes in like a monster (Super Wal-Marts) and disrupts the local economy to such a
> degree that they manage to wipe out all other businesses, including most mom and pop shops,
> grocery stores, mechanics, furniture stores, florists, gardening shops, day care facilities,
> etc.
Maybe it is you that needs to visit a small town sometime. I don't visit, I live it. Population about 10,000 with perhaps another 10K in the drive in to town range. We have had a Super Walmart here for years and a normal one before that. K-Mart got run out of town along with some small mom & pop 'general merchandise' retailers almost instantly when Wally World first arrived. However we still have two grocery stores (both Brookshire Bros. now but still in two locations at opposite ends of town), a wide variety of auto mechanics, including a Quik Lube in sight of Walmart, several furniture stores, at least two florists (if for nothing else, because Walmart doesn't deliver; important feature in the florist business), multiple 'gardening shops'/nurseries and I really don't know where you get day care facilities because I have been in dozens of Walmarts and have yet to see one in the day care business. We also have a couple of pharmacies still keeping their door open, even after we lost one to Y2K issues.
> But how do you trigger a thermal alarm on a virtual machine (without access to
> the "real" OS)?
If it is a P-IV in a 1U rack I'd suspect all you would have to do would be chew CPU cycles like mad for a hour. It isn't that hard, most of the first batch of P-IV chips ran so hot they will only run at their rated speed for a few minutes without some serious aftermarket cooling solutions. So there are potentially a couple million machines out there which are especially vulnerable.
> Wal-Mart has had this impact on developers and publishers for quite some time.
Wow, retailer has effect on producer! This is news!
Uh huh. Local affiliates have a major influence on the major TV networks. The TV networks have a big effect on what Hollywood produces, it isn't a 'perfect system' where the artists exercise total creative control over what the poor rubes in flyover country see in primetime.
Local car dealers have an influence on what Detroit (and Japan) produce. If they don't think the locals will buy em they don't order. Or more likely when they give their feedback on the proposed new design it is never built in the first place.
And now we are shocked, yes shocked to learn that retailers don't just tell EA "Oh we trust you guys, just send over a truck and a bill and we will buy whatever you put out." Doesn't work that way folks. Retail margins are slim, mostly thanks to WalMart because they learned to thrive in a low margin high volume world. This is generally a good thing.
I know hating Walmart around here is almost a much fun as the daily Hate Bushitler thread, but get over it already. If you don't like em don't shop there, if enough people vote with their feet they are boned, otherwise they will hang around and keep banking big sacks of cash.
> The exploit requires escalated privileges to begin with. The only thing it can currently
> be used for is bypassing secure levels inside of OpenBSD, where you already have root.
People, think this through a bit and some more dangers appear. If root can replace System Management Mode there are some interesting possibilities for evil. SMM runs at permission levels beyond ring0, think of it as ring-1. From there you can escape any virtualization, any chroot jail, probably even escape from inside an emulator like VMWare if you can manage to execute the exploit without the emulation catching it and simulating it. Until this is completely understood and fixed, Xen, usermode linux, chroot and possibly VMWare/VirtualPC should be suspect.
Now imagine just how many people have root access to their virtual server at a hosting company and how many other users are running on the same physical hardware secure in the belief that their customer information is safe. But is it?
> Lets discover what a nuclear bomb looks like on the moon god damnit.
Has Frank J. (of imao.us infamy) started posting on slashdot?
> I don't think I can bear to read the following hundreds of ignorant "I've
> heard it's all due to the sun getting hotter" crap we always get on Slashdot
> AGW stories.
Right, your religious faith sustains you through anything, especially anything as puny as logic or facts that don't support your beliefs. Dude, anybody that belives Global Warming is both a) established as a fact beyond debate and b) that the CAUSE of such warming is also established beyond debate is an ignorant savage deserving of exactlt the same attention of reasoning beings as Pat Robertson, Usama Bin Laden and the rest of the religious fanatics bedeviling the civilized world.
The sun IS burning hotter. NASA is detecting upward temperature trends on Mars and I really don't think that is amendable to human intervention. The temprature on Mars doesn't depend on our CO2 emission levels, whether or not you drive a hybrid car or if we ratify the Kyoto Treaty.
We desperately need to get the religion and green politics out of our science so we can answer the questions that matter. Is the earth warming? Is it cyclic? If it is dangerous to us and our civilization, what are the options for solving the problems? For instance, assume the Earth is warming in a non-cyclic pattern. Is the answer to destroy industrialized civilization in order to save it or is it possible to use our science to offset the bad effects?
But to the small minded intolerant political types like yourself there are no questions and the answer was the same as before the reason was global warming. To a socialist the answer to every problem is always more socialism. Global Warming is just this week's excuse because you guys decided fear might sell better than greed and class envy.
> ...their package manager (too much dependency hell)....
You are either basing that on five year old experiences (which were horrible, I was there too) or not using the right tool for the job. These days only real propeller spinners need to manually invoke rpm. Up2Date and Yum take all the dependecy hell out of package manangement. Using rpm manually in this day would make about as much sense as a Debian user using dpkg manually instead of apt-get.
And no, apt-get isn't the answer despite people continuing to attempt to hammer it into RH based distros. As long as you stick to i386 it sorta works but it doesn't deal with bi-arch at all so if you load up an x86_64 machine you will soon have to abandon apt. Yum and Up2Date work though.
Thousands and thousands of bills are introduced in legislatures around the US and worldwide it is probably a million or more. Far fewer pass and even fewer of those make it th erest of the way into becoming a law. (For the civics challenged/non-US readers: In most US states it will also need a sponsor in the other legislative body, passage in both bodies and either signing into law by the Governor or another vote to override a veto.)
It is good that such an idea is starting to bubble up, but it has yet to pass into law ANYWHERE at this point. The political power, wealth and proven tendency to resort to outright illegal measures of the Foe is going to make this a long difficult struggle.
> Find me a "super free" replacement for Java and C and I'll stop
Dude, you need to read closer. I was offtopic on a rant against OO in general with my plea for a modernized procedural language. Java isn't fit to be mentioned in the same breath with C at any rate. Java is more like Turbo Pascal or Visual Basic, something budding programmers write freeware (And usually not Free Software although there are notable exceptions) with or corporations write massive but essentially uncomplicated applications in because hordes of cheap semi skilled labor can crank out code that isn't particularly well written but is protected by the runtime from the worst programming errors.
As for Free replacements for Java, how about mono, PHP, Perl, Python, C++, Objective C, etc. I think there is even a Free Turbo Pascal/Delphi clone you could look at. All available now, and all currently being used to create "secure, stable, line-of-business, database-driven applications" unlike GCJ that is still mostly under development and unsuitable for most production work.
> The GNU project built the GNU operating system and combined with the Linux kernel, it
> makes the GNU/Linux operating system. It's really not a bad idea, you know.
No, GNU never built an operating system. They built a lot of really useful parts but have never assembled them into an operating system. On the day they do that final part we will at last have GNU. Not GNU/Linux, GNU. The FSF could have taken the freely redistributable Linux kernel and integrated it into a finished GNU, they chose not to. Only a year or so after Linux became popular the BSD kernel emerged from it's legal dispute. The FSF could have used it to complete GNU, they chose not to do so. The FSF could have done whatever it took to get HURD to a 1.0 version and thus completed GNU, again they chose differently.
Instead dozens of independent organizations (RedHat, Slackware, Debian, SUSE, Yggdrasil, etc, most now defunct) took all of the parts (including a non-GNU libc for the first several years) and did the hard work of integrating all the various parts (including a buttload of stuff that didn't come from the FSF, like X) and made a family of related operating systems. None of these are GNU. RedHat is not GNU. Debian was under the auspices of the FSF for a couple of years but still both parties chose NOT to call it GNU instead of Debian. But had they wished to co-brand it would have been GNU/Debian, Debian GNU or GNU/Debian Linux, but calling it Debian GNU/Linux is an incorrect usage of Mr. Torvalds trademark (even if not registered as a legal trademark at the time). Merging GNU and Linux with a / implies they are related however Linux is not under the auspices of the GNU project or the FSF.
> I'll give two reasons... one, as RMS states, Linus is not especially sympathetic to
> the free software movement - this means people hearing 'Linux' never get to hear about
> free software.
Tough noogies. Linus isn't the one who chooses the names of distributions any more than RMS can. RedHat could call their product RedHat OS, or could have paid for the trademark and certification testing and called it RedHat UNIX. Or anything else they wanted to. It was THEIR choice (subject to Linus's agreement regarding his trademark rights to the term 'linux') what to name their product. Same with Debian or SUSE. Just as a guess I'd say they all include "Linux" in their name because they feel customers will associate it in a positive way, something that wouldn't be true with GNU as only the already converted know much about it.
> He needs Sun and Java...
.NET/mono for that matter) are totally unneeded in the Free world, we get write once run anywhere from autoconf/automake not some crappy bytecode emulator for closed binaries.
Why? Care to explain why the Free Software world needs Java? The FSF is working on cloning it solely because ignorant people built up a lot of otherwise Free infrastructure on Java either not knowing it wasn't Free or not caring. Much like the early days of KDE where they just didn't care about QT being closed source, forcing RedHat to put up the money to help the FSF launch GNOME so as to avert a disaster. And now we have RedHat and the FSF working to clean up other people's mess over the Java fiasco.
Java (and
Just to be clear, I'm dissing Java the platform and mono the platform, not Java and C# the languages. Both are perfectly acceptable languages for those into the OO thing. Me, I'm a total neolithic curmudgeon who is still unconvinced of the utility of OO. Find me a non-trivial OO program that isn't several times the size in code, runtime image, cpu cycles and development time compared to an equivalent procedural program. And as for code reuse, a C library is about the ultimate in that department.
What I'd like to see is a new procedural language taking most of C except replacing the zero terminated strings with something sane and including a garbage collecting string library. Fix some of the other bits that made sense in the dark ages of limited ram/cpu but leave the essence intact.
> Since it is possible to flash the BIOS from within a client OS, I'd say it is not
> impossible to reach the point some day where an infected machine has to be junked.
Only if you are the sort of irresponsible idiot who would run Windows in a secure location in the first place. Security aware types seek out motherboards with protections against such foolishness. Either a jumper to disallow all writes or a BIOS option to lock out writes after POST and a facility in the BIOS itself to update itself from a floppy.
Now the other reply to your post, about the possibility for a future Windows malware to drop a rootkit into any Linux partitions on a dual boot machine, is a frightening possibility. Will be real fun when one infests dual boot Apples.
Microsoft sees VMWare as their enemy because they are banking cash today. (Thou shalt have no other vendors other than Microsoft) However Xen is probably the bigger threat. And I'd say they understand that as well, otherwise they could have done the one thing that would have made an instant difference.
Remember that when Xen was a research project at a university they had XP running in Xen because they had a source license for XP. However since said license didn't allow actually releasing anything derived from knowledge gained from that source they couldn't release the XP client drivers. Had Microsoft removed that restriction or, even better, provided Microsoft supported drivers Xen would likely crush VMWare in a few short years.
> I can see where you're coming from, but if that's the case, why didn't the Bible-thumpers support it?
Because they don't understand the Internet.
> My, that slope sure is slippery.
.xxx TLD and everything outside it that isn't Disney's version of reality will get their butts sued. And if you don't believe Congress won't force the default position of the ISP filters the second they would A) be affordable and B) effective hasn't been following the continual efforts of Congress to 'protect the children' from the 'evil, wicked and outright depraved Internet.'
.kids and force disney.com into it.
No, just a realistic appraisal of the legal and political climate in the US, as observed by a native who has followed politics for longer than the average slashdotter has been potty trained. I'm not even a crazed leftwing moonbat who sees a police state hiding under every rock, I'm a libertarian leaning small government Republican. But I know what Congress is capable of though, and have to speak out even when it would be Republicans leading the charge.
The only thing that keeps the trial lawyers at bay now is the reality that there IS no effective way to keep objectional content in a dank corner of the Internet so you can't sue every time your little hellion sees something naughty and our 1st Amendment won't allow the whole Internet (as viewed in the US) to become a big freaking Barney masturbertorium. But you give em a
If we just have to have a segregated Internet create
> I guess the main argument is that it should be fairly trivial to filter out any domain ending in .xxx,
.xxx domain is ever created the legal climate in the US will force any content that isn't 'child safe' into it. All it would take is one threat of a lawsuit from a rapacious trial lawyer (and we have a couple million of those monsters lurking here) and any site that wasn't perfectly safe for kiddies would move. Combine that with the law that would shamble out of Congress within a year or two of .xxx going live that would require every ISP to filter .xxx by default for new customers (to protect the 'precious innocent children' of course) and we would see an Internet as locked down as China. Just filtering different stuff, but counted by sites almost certainly more and counted by sites that are useful about as many.
Which is why it must never be allowed to be brought into existance. Listen up a second before that inflamatory slashdot article turns this thread into today's two minute hate.
If a
> Is not FORCE people to use .xxx.
.xxx, the lawyers will do that part for them free of charge. That is why .xxx is a terrible idea, once it exists porn outside of it will find itself liable for every kiddie who wanders in 'by accident' and every backwoods community who finds its 'community standards' violated. Then once all of the porn is safely contained in .xxx every company will block it and every ISP will offer to block it. Then a few years later all the ISPs will block it by default and only open it up by request, this after Congress passes yet another law 'to protect the children.'
.xxx is not a good idea.
No these scam artists won't have to force people into
And of course the definition of what is 'porn' will change until eventually anything that isn't 'child safe' will be forced to relocate to escape the lawyers. So no,
> The US Constitution is a "baseline" as far as rights go.
That certainly wasn't how it was seen at the time it was ratified. For example the 1st Amendment forbids the establishment of a State Religion, something many of the individual States had.
> If people have a right to free speech, and money is speech, doesn't that mean that the
> arguments of those in favor of forcing broadcasters to give airtime to people without
> compensation are valid?
Someone is confusing Presses and Attorneys. You have the right to an attorney, if you can not afford one, one will be provided for you. On the other hand, while you also have the Right to a Free Press, A Press will not be provided to you for Free. However if you can afford 10.95/mo for Netzero and $100 for an old beatup Dell you CAN bitch on Slashdot or Daily Kos all you want.
And class, what can be learn from this? Presses are valuable, we don't just give them to any crackpot who demands one. Attorneys on the other hand are worthless pieces of crap we give away for free to any old spammer or pedophile.
> For example, confiscating land for "public use" is quite clear and is vastly different
> than "private use that might ultimately provide some public good." It didn't take much for
> 95% of the population to agree on that after the travesty that was the Kelo ruling.
Actually Kelo was a good example of strict constructionism at work. The 'good guys', as opposed to the nimrods who yank new laws fully formed from their asses, on the court ruled against an outcome they clearly would have preferred and stuck to the law as written. The state constituition in question clearly permitted the action and the US Consitituition as a general rule only limits what the US Government can do. So they upheld the taking and noted that if the state laws were different they would have ruled differently, whereupon the outraged folks in the various states looked at their local laws and are in the process of making changes where needed.
> The latest and most significant restrictions were passed by a Republican-controlled House
> and Democratic-controlled Senate, signed by a Democratic President, and approved by a
> split Supreme Court.
No, the first real 'campaign finance laws' were passed by Democrats in the aftermath of Watergate. This latest batch was rammed by Sen McCain(RINO-AZ), Sen Feingold(D-WI), and the MSM(D). Signed by a sometimes conservative President Bush(R) who stated that it was his belief that it was unconstituitional but knew the months of acrimony a veto would bring would distract from a fairly important War he was kinda preoccupied with. (Not that I absolve Shrubbie, he violated his Oath of Office by signing it just as much as McCain or Feingold for sponsoring it.) Then the usual suspects on the Supreme Court ignored the 1st Amendment and upheld it. And amazingly the Democratic machine was all prepped and ready to roll around McCain Feingold with an extensive network of 527 organizations. Guess we now know why they were really for it. And of course a lot of Republican incumbents saw it as a positive for themselves, which was why they were so easy to steamroll into supporting it.
Reducing the amount of money in politics only serves to increase the power of incumbency. Being an incumbent gets you plenty of free press coverage.
> On television and radio, you can buy advertising time to the exclusion of the other party.
In theory perhaps, but in reality I doubt it would ever be a problem. If one side was so well funded it could afford to replace most television programming with campaign infomercials, outbidding the opposing camp for the time no less, then it is a virtual certainty that side is probably going to carry the day some election time. Sorry if that offends your egalitarian sensibilities but that is reality for you.
> Conclusion: Internet like speech. Television, radio unlike speech. Hence the reason the
> FEC regulates certain things and not others.
Ok, and explain the FEC's justification for regulating billboards, newspaper advertising, magazine advertising, direct mail campaigns, Internet banner adverstising, phone banks, door to door campaigning, floating blimps carrying a message, yard signs, etc, etc. I won't hold my breath waiting, because there isn't any justification other than the side in power at the time thought the regulation would help their candidates get elected.
> You do not have a first ammendment right to give money to your candidate for the very
> reason that Money IS speech.
Wow, that is doublethink of a quality not seen (other than as deliberate satire) outside of Daily Kos. You admit that money IS speech yet somehow in the same breath claim that makes it speech NOT protected by the 1st Amendment. Sorry, if it is speech then "Congress shall make NO law...."
Yes, some people, some causes, will have more money than other people or causes. Some political movements will have more wealthy donors within it, some will have more rabid volunteers, others will have famous people who can act as effective spokesmen for their causes. Yet so long as all are men[1] are equal before the law, all have but one vote and all may speak freely without fear of government reprisal then we have a free and fair political process.
[1] The word 'men' as used here isn't meant to imply women don't have the same rights, just refusing to bow to political correctness and use tortured language constructs to get around English's historical artifacts.
> But the Libertarian notion that you can eliminate the influence of money in politics is no
> less naive than the Marxist assumption that a dictatorship of the proletariat will gave way
> to an egalitarian state.
You assume we WANT to eliminate the influence of money. Not at all, we couldn't care less. Speech == money, money == speech, the two are interchangable and the more of both the better. As a nation we currently spend less electing a POTUS than deciding Coke vs. Pepsi or Tastes Great vs Less Filling.. As a voter I couldn't care less if a candidate is getting a crapload of money to buy advertising with. I do care WHERE the crapload of money is coming from. If it is from people and/or organizations I don't agree with it counts against the candidate, but if the contributions are politically/philosophically in sync my my own views I'd think it was great.
But the notion that regulating money isn't regulating speech requires Newthink. Other than standing on a soapbox in the park, any political speech has a cost in cash. Regulating the flow of cash by definition regulates the free flow of political speech.