Also, how come we don't have cars that can drive themself on the interstate?
We have cars that are smart enough to drive themselves on the interstate if they are the only cars on the road; or rather, computers whose ai is sophisticated enough to handle this. The problem is that no ai is sufficiently sophisticated to handle the randomness of real-world driving conditions, especially human drivers.
So essentially we would need all cars to be smart cars to get smart cars to drive themselves. In the meantime, we are stuck with all humans driving.
...Almost no-one has the knowledge, skill and time to analyse the code to the required depth and then make fixes such as those you suggest. The "anyone can fix it" claim of OSS is mostly an illusory benefit for large-scale projects like Linux, Apache or Mozilla.
Any company can fix the problems with open source software because they can and do employ developers. It is true that "joe schmoe" is at a disadvantage here, but he also has developers ready to help him that he can pay or that might do things for him for free. I have never seen a Free Software project where the developers/maintainers or some forker was not responsive to suggestions and bug reports, and usually any local LUG is full of programmers that would be happy to help.
Besides, there are a lot of unemployed programmers out there using Linux. It makes sense to give them a job if they can do something useful.
Then why should we be able to hold Firestone accountable for crappy tires they sold? Obviously, a tire can be deconstructed to see exactly what materials it's made of, as well as the quality of it's construction. It's your fault if you don't look at them yourself, right?
No we cannot see how Firestone tires are constructed. Neither do we build them before using them in our cars. However with Free Software you can and do build the software before use.
Yeah, it's fashionable to want to sue Bill, but what if some guy creates some virus that brings a Linux system down to it's knees? Who do we sue? Linus? OSDL? Or will there be a double standard? Remember, if Bill gets to be sued, be prepared for your favorite OSS house to be liable as well. Otherwise it's just sheer hypocrisy to target MS. And remember, MS is made of of coders who went to the same schools as you. Contrary to OSS opinion, Bill does not write every single line of code in the products nowadays.
The difference with Free Software like Linux is that the source code is available. When you run Free Software you have just done exactly what the guy building XP over in Redmond does. So to a certain extent, you are just as responsible for the quality of the software.
Even if you don't go with that, the fact of the matter is that with Microsoft software you have no idea what you are getting and if there is something wrong, a security hole, something not working, etc. you are completely at Microsoft's mercy. But with Free Software you can change the software and it is not up to Linus to stop you.
Case in point would be the fights over preemptability, vm, and scheduling in the Linux kernel. Several people did not like the way it worked. They could see how it worked because they saw the source as well as the result on their machines. For some applications the Linux kernel just was not delivering; it was not suitable for their purpose.
But people disagreed on the right way to go, and Linus was not ready to choose. So people went off and wrote their own patches and distributed them and people used them. Now many of these enhancements are part of the 2.6 kernel. p.By contrast, if you use Microsoft products and dislike the way they are designed, you are faced with an all-or-nothing situation. You can use them or not. There are vulnerabilities which Microsoft refuses to fix because they would have to rethink their design. This is not a problem with Free Software.
Actually I don't see any requirement in this bill of rights that Free Software authors would have trouble with. IN fact they already comply with every one of these points. It is only proprietary software vendors who refuse to disclose bugs and do not disclose the license before you buy the software. Free Software gives a freely accessable license you can view beforehand, they disclose all bugs beforehand, and they have no problme with reverse-engineering or working for interoperability.
"But this is America. Consumer rights are secondary to business rights..."... and making things better is secondary to making smug, cynical statements.
You just described Microsoft's business model. Why make decent software when you can make smug, cynical statements instead? What a country!:)
Oh, here's an idea... let's all move to a country where most of the population despises Americans (just about any country other than Canada)
Sorry, dude. According to my Canadian friends, they hate us there, too. This last set of wars did not help. You will notice this is the first time they have not helped us in a war since the ones we were fighting against them. So, no, we are screwed. No one likes us now, but they do like those tasty American Greenbacks!:)
"Every human being has a right to live a decent life."
Really? Well, there are several hundreds of millions of people throughout the globe dying from starvation, preventable diseases, unclean water and so forth, in case you didn't know -- 40,000 a day, some people estimate.
So give them money, you say. Well, fine in theory; the problem is, if we distributed the entire economic asset base of the planet evenly, it would work out to around $13000 a person.
Which is not enough, probably, to cover what you hand-wavingly pass over as "decent" for a single year.
And the NEXT year, whoops! We have no assets left -- no factories, no production, no pretty much NOTHING! Mass starvation ensues and population collapses to the twelve million or so hunter-gatherers the planet is capable of supporting.
So.
The facts kinda knock your assertion all to hell, don't they now?
You paint quite a picture there, Mr Economist. The problem with your theory, to which unfortunately far too many idiotic politicians seem to subscribe, is that it is the long-discredited economic theory known as the zero -sum game. In other words, other people having a decent life means you don't get to have one. That is not how things work.
If people in other countries work and produce goods, they get money to buy your goods, and you can buy their goods. This is good for everybody, and results in everyone's standard of living rising. Compare the standard of living in variosu areas of the world over the last 200 years and you will quickly recognize that both in the developed world (like Europe and North America) and in developing countries like Pakistan the standard of living has improved in this period. It stands to reason that continuing this trend is a good thing.
That report, and most others like it, ignores corporate taxes completely. I think it is funny more work has not been done in reporting and exposing corporate taxes and their effects, as corporations, unlike people, must report the tax they paid publicly.
Corporations do get away with not paying taxes quite regularly. The reasoning is that reducing tax on business allows businesses to hire more people. That is good reasoning, honestly, so long as they hold up their end. Lately they have not been doing so.
I would propose that at the very least corporations' tax benefits be tied directly to their annual growth in domestic employment. In other words, they must hire *more* Americans each year, or no cookie. They could still lay people off, but they must replace them with something else. The extra taxes would help pay the unemployment these corporations are causing by their shortsighted layoffs for which they are currently rewarded with higher stock prices.
I also think that if a corporation is based in the US it should have to employ a certain amount of US workers. I have no problem with having people overseas work where it makes sense, and I think that immigrants have a perfect right to come here and work, but I also think it is wrong they are currently being exploited by American citizens, at the detriment of American citizens. That is clearly something we can do something about.
We should pass a law that US-based corporations must follow US labour laws and environmental laws when they go to other people's countries. I am tired of the US having the reputation of the neighbour whose dogs always shit on everyone elese's lawn. These people should be proud Americans who behave themselves with dignity when in someone else's house.
We should also enforce our immigration laws. It is illegal to hire an H1-B for less than the normal wage of the job for which they are hired, and it is illegal to use the H1-B to displace US Workers. However, corporations openly do it and admit it. That should be federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison time for those responsible, a raise for the H1-B worker (it's not their fault, and ultimately this person might become an American one day) and put someone else in charge who knows better.
Survival of the fittest will bite this country in the ass if we let this sort of thing go on forever. You can't let a few people completely ruin the economy of your country and ship all the jobs elsewhere and stay alive. Eventually you have to do something about it.
These people are living in the US, enjoying the freedom and prosperity of the US, while ruining it. Not only that, but they are shipping the work that is important to our infrastructure and defense to known terrorist havens and/or enemies of the US. How much of our important technology has been compromised, trojaned, or simply stolen as a result? What happens when the navigation system for a helicopter gunship starts flashing "Hacked by Chinese" instead of the map?
I say if you live in the US you should do what is best for the country no matter if you are a sanitation engineer, a software engineer, or a CEO. If the corporations truly could not deal with this and left, that's fine with me too because we can make more once they are gone. The difference between the US and these other countries is that we actually invent things and have the entrepeneur spirit required to create companies.
If I were living in India, I would be mad about this too. Not that the US Corporations were giving my countrymen badly-needed jobs, but that more Indians were not starting corporations and creating products to compete with the US instead. India is perfectly capable of producing another Sun with another Solaris, or a better Microsoft, but they haven't. Why is that?
Clearly this situation is not good for India in any case, as they are only being explited and therefore do not have control of their destiny. Already more corporations are shipping the jobs that were US jobs then were Indians' jobs off to China, their enemy. How do you think that makes them feel?
You can bet that Microsoft probably wishes different choices were made. And I'm sure that thousands of Microsoft employees curses the choices that were made daily. Choices that were made against the constraints of the time they were made in.
And the "encryption" you're talking about is either the reversible encryption, or the old "home" computer versions deployed in small workgroups. In which case let me say, "I've also noticed the unsuitability of screw drivers for pounding nails."
But the difference here is that Windows is designed to be insecure. No matter how hard you try, any system will have bugs, because it is designed by humans. But Microsoft has deliberately added "features" to their operating system and made design decisions whihc make it insecure and unstable. They aren't even trying, either because they don't feel that they have to compete, or because they do not care.
The encryption I am talking about is the password encryption for NT and Windows 2000. Firstly, it is weak and recently has proven trivial to crack. Secondly there is the matter of NT sending passwords over the wire to connect to smb file shares, which initially were plaintext, and later were encrypted using this sad encryption in SP4 or so (even then it was possible to turn the encryption off and many did).
You are right about screws being unsuitable for use as nails nails, but then Microsoft products are likewise unsuitable for use in enterprise environments or anywhere that security is even vaguely important.
On TV the other night I watched in disbelief as a Stock Analyst recommend his viewers buy SCO stock. "There's a little problem with the ownership of the operating system," he said, "but we feel it will all be worked out soon enough".
When a stock analyst says that on TV, it means he wants to get rid of some SCO stock and FAST.
In all seriousness, yes the problem was with Microsoft software, but in reality the patches were available almost full month before the blaster worm was released. As a result, those corporations who had not patched their systems (and blocked the relative ports at the firewalls) should share a LARGE chunk of the blame, but the ultimate blame rests on those who exploited the vulnerabilty, regardless of their motivation. Just because the door is open, doesn't give you the right to come in.
People keep saying that, but the fact of the matter is that the patches that were available a month before did not protect people from some of the worm variants. Microsoft has been patching RPC all year and has still not gotten it right. In the heat the worm infestations (about a week's time) they released four or more patches for these vulnerabilities. Clearly the worm writers kept finding bugs in Microsoft's cruft.
It does not make sense to me that Windows needs an RPC service and won't let you turn it off, anyway. It is ridiculous and an inherent security flaw from the beginning. Likewise their "encryption" that is crackable in 13 seconds for passwords. This of course was supposed to be better than their previous model of sending passwords over the net for no good reason in plaintext. Great.
It does no good to lambast admins by saying "patches were out months ago" when the patches either broke things, did not protect from the $famous_worm_du_jour, or both for good measure, which has been the case with every worm lately.
The logic here is unbelieveable. So if you forget to lock a window in your home, and a burglar comes in and steals your stuff, and the burglar gets caught, YOU should be prosecuted for burglary for leaving the window open?
No, but if the guy who built my house put little windows all over it that only burglars know about, and made sure the ones I do know about are broken such that they are difficult/impossible to keep closed, I would be pretty upset with him, wouldn't you?
We need to start making people take responsibility for their own ACTIONS and quit blaming others. It's like blaming a door-lock manufacturer because someone can pick the lock! There will always be people that take UNLAWFUL advantage of real or perceived situations. That doesn't mean they are any less to blame for their actions.
This door lock manufacturer has designed his door locks specifically to be easily picked on purpose. That is the difference here. Virus writers are wrong, but Microsoft wants a caning as well.
I realize that you are joking, but your post is pretty heavy on the garbage. The GPL does not require you to distribute anything. If you _choose_ to distribute it, though, you must follow the terms of the GPL.
But how do you run a worm without distributing it?:)
Yep. And those limits are explicitly stated in the Second Amendment. It guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, not artillery, and the difference between the two was well understood by the men who voted on the thing. Unfortunately, because that basic understanding has passed from the popular consciousness lots of people try to make specious arguments like "You want assault rifles? Well, what about howitzers? What about nukes?" To be fair, there's some crossover between the two categories. The old brightline test of "man-portability" no longer really applies since weapons with the power of artillery pieces can now be carried by one man; there are also rifles too big for one man to practically carry. And U.S. law says almost nothing about certain odd categories of weaponry, like flamethrowers (surprisingly legal and unregulated in most places). Generally, though, the line between arms and artillery is still pretty easy to draw. The Second protects the right to keep and bear the former and provides no such protection for people who want to collect the latter.
The thought of McBride with a nuke is pretty chilling though. Why did you have to conjure up that image for me?:-)
Actually the second amendment specifically recommends military weaponry. After all it does say "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." The writers of this amendment were fully expecting the average person to be proficient with the most advanced weaponry of the day. You have to rememebr at this point there was no standing army and we had just angered the world's greatest superpower. We were standing in the backyard of the other two. To maintain stability and freedom, it would be necessary to defend it.
There have been numerous quotations by the founders of the US and long treatises in which they explain in some detail exactly what is meant by this amendment. Those who seek to dilute it have neither read these nor a dictionary (care to look up the meaning of "abridged?").
The fact of the matter is that there is an extreme disconnect between what is considered "reasonable" today and the intent of the men and women who worked to make this country what it is today. The only real argument against holding to the standards of free speech, free religion, and right to bear arms the progenitors of this nation expected, held and fought for is that "in a reasonable and civilized society we do not need such weaponry" or "you can't really expect to let people get away with saying whatever they like, now can you?" But the people who wrote the constitution and declaration of independence were extremists. They understood that there is no inherent right of government to give people anything at all. Rather, humans have infinite rights and agree to restrictions in order to live together. They recognized that certain of these rights were so inviolable that there was never a good reason to give them up. They took the trouble to write them down. But no one reads these things anymore, so the people they warned us about get away with breaking the law.
Remember, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. If you decide you don't care about rights, then someone will decide to relieve you of them.
Fortunately the doll will say "Lunix sucks" and even agree that it does suck. But if you try to get her to say "Linux" then she says "that's a bad word. We use Windows around here."
runs on a C64 can't be all that grandiose by modern standards.
I can't decide if the missing "from" is just another layer of clever wit, or run-of-the-mill slashdot sloppiness. Given the content, probably the latter.
Actually "from" would be superfluous in that sentence, though in US English it is commonly used in such contexts. Perhaps the original speaker is a Briton or an Anglophile. Personally, I think it is too bad that US English has degenerated so badly. Most people seem to speak and write little better than chimpanzees on this side of the water.
Because the uucp uid still owns all the serial port hardware. You need UUCP so that your modems will work, even though they are not running the UUCP protocol.
This is irrational. Presumably you could create any user/group you wanted and give it access to this hardware, so long as the users that the programs that need access to this hardware run as are also part of that group/that user. BUt why mess with perfection? If it works, there is no reason to change it. There is nothing magic about the name uucp. It just happens to be the name chosen by convention.
"Canadians don't have the same free speech rights as the US" What? Are you really that stupid? http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/charter/ Our equivalent of your constitution. The same rules apply, too. If a law is enacted that is in contravention to the Charter, and if it can be proven so, then it can be stricken from the books.
What I am referring to is: " 1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."
Any right guaranteed in the Canadian Charter falls under this limitation. The Canadian Charter specifically gives the government the right to limit the rights of its citizens. By contrast the US Constitution specifically says thet the US Government does not have the right to restrict the rights enumerated therein. The Canadian government has shown that it does indeed interpret the Charter this way through regular censorship. In the US, the government tries to enact censorship but is often stopped because of the guarantees in the US Constitution. Again, most Canadians don't even know about this part of their Charter. Don't feel bad, the number of Americans who read the Constitution has been dropping significantly; far fewer even understand it.
You're thinking of Apollo Diamond, which plans to use revenues from selling vapor deposition gemstones to fund research into diamond semiconductors. There's a nice writeup about synthetic diamonds at E2.
However, in many markets, synthetic diamonds sold as gemstones have to be labeled as synthetic, giving De Beers an out: "A diamond isn't forever if it was grown in a lab five days ago."
Diamonds from vapour? Sounds like vapourware to me!:) Hmm, maybe they are not forever, but instead are "Duke Nukem Forever." That is what happened to it! It was vapour and they made it into diamonds!
Slashdot Mirror
Let me have an hour with your sister.
What? so you can teach her how to handle your stick?
Also, how come we don't have cars that can drive themself on the interstate?
We have cars that are smart enough to drive themselves on the interstate if they are the only cars on the road; or rather, computers whose ai is sophisticated enough to handle this. The problem is that no ai is sufficiently sophisticated to handle the randomness of real-world driving conditions, especially human drivers.
So essentially we would need all cars to be smart cars to get smart cars to drive themselves. In the meantime, we are stuck with all humans driving.
Any company can fix the problems with open source software because they can and do employ developers. It is true that "joe schmoe" is at a disadvantage here, but he also has developers ready to help him that he can pay or that might do things for him for free. I have never seen a Free Software project where the developers/maintainers or some forker was not responsive to suggestions and bug reports, and usually any local LUG is full of programmers that would be happy to help.
Besides, there are a lot of unemployed programmers out there using Linux. It makes sense to give them a job if they can do something useful.
Then why should we be able to hold Firestone accountable for crappy tires they sold? Obviously, a tire can be deconstructed to see exactly what materials it's made of, as well as the quality of it's construction. It's your fault if you don't look at them yourself, right?
No we cannot see how Firestone tires are constructed. Neither do we build them before using them in our cars. However with Free Software you can and do build the software before use.
Yeah, it's fashionable to want to sue Bill, but what if some guy creates some virus that brings a Linux system down to it's knees? Who do we sue? Linus? OSDL? Or will there be a double standard? Remember, if Bill gets to be sued, be prepared for your favorite OSS house to be liable as well. Otherwise it's just sheer hypocrisy to target MS. And remember, MS is made of of coders who went to the same schools as you. Contrary to OSS opinion, Bill does not write every single line of code in the products nowadays.
The difference with Free Software like Linux is that the source code is available. When you run Free Software you have just done exactly what the guy building XP over in Redmond does. So to a certain extent, you are just as responsible for the quality of the software.
Even if you don't go with that, the fact of the matter is that with Microsoft software you have no idea what you are getting and if there is something wrong, a security hole, something not working, etc. you are completely at Microsoft's mercy. But with Free Software you can change the software and it is not up to Linus to stop you.
Case in point would be the fights over preemptability, vm, and scheduling in the Linux kernel. Several people did not like the way it worked. They could see how it worked because they saw the source as well as the result on their machines. For some applications the Linux kernel just was not delivering; it was not suitable for their purpose.
But people disagreed on the right way to go, and Linus was not ready to choose. So people went off and wrote their own patches and distributed them and people used them. Now many of these enhancements are part of the 2.6 kernel.
p.By contrast, if you use Microsoft products and dislike the way they are designed, you are faced with an all-or-nothing situation. You can use them or not. There are vulnerabilities which Microsoft refuses to fix because they would have to rethink their design. This is not a problem with Free Software.
Actually I don't see any requirement in this bill of rights that Free Software authors would have trouble with. IN fact they already comply with every one of these points. It is only proprietary software vendors who refuse to disclose bugs and do not disclose the license before you buy the software. Free Software gives a freely accessable license you can view beforehand, they disclose all bugs beforehand, and they have no problme with reverse-engineering or working for interoperability.
"But this is America. Consumer rights are secondary to business rights..." ... and making things better is secondary to making smug, cynical statements.
You just described Microsoft's business model. Why make decent software when you can make smug, cynical statements instead? What a country! :)
Oh, here's an idea... let's all move to a country where most of the population despises Americans (just about any country other than Canada)
Sorry, dude. According to my Canadian friends, they hate us there, too. This last set of wars did not help. You will notice this is the first time they have not helped us in a war since the ones we were fighting against them. So, no, we are screwed. No one likes us now, but they do like those tasty American Greenbacks! :)
"Every human being has a right to live a decent life."
Really? Well, there are several hundreds of millions of people throughout the globe dying from starvation, preventable diseases, unclean water and so forth, in case you didn't know -- 40,000 a day, some people estimate.
So give them money, you say. Well, fine in theory; the problem is, if we distributed the entire economic asset base of the planet evenly, it would work out to around $13000 a person.
Which is not enough, probably, to cover what you hand-wavingly pass over as "decent" for a single year.
And the NEXT year, whoops! We have no assets left -- no factories, no production, no pretty much NOTHING! Mass starvation ensues and population collapses to the twelve million or so hunter-gatherers the planet is capable of supporting.
So.
The facts kinda knock your assertion all to hell, don't they now?
You paint quite a picture there, Mr Economist. The problem with your theory, to which unfortunately far too many idiotic politicians seem to subscribe, is that it is the long-discredited economic theory known as the zero -sum game. In other words, other people having a decent life means you don't get to have one. That is not how things work.
If people in other countries work and produce goods, they get money to buy your goods, and you can buy their goods. This is good for everybody, and results in everyone's standard of living rising. Compare the standard of living in variosu areas of the world over the last 200 years and you will quickly recognize that both in the developed world (like Europe and North America) and in developing countries like Pakistan the standard of living has improved in this period. It stands to reason that continuing this trend is a good thing.
That report, and most others like it, ignores corporate taxes completely. I think it is funny more work has not been done in reporting and exposing corporate taxes and their effects, as corporations, unlike people, must report the tax they paid publicly.
Corporations do get away with not paying taxes quite regularly. The reasoning is that reducing tax on business allows businesses to hire more people. That is good reasoning, honestly, so long as they hold up their end. Lately they have not been doing so.
I would propose that at the very least corporations' tax benefits be tied directly to their annual growth in domestic employment. In other words, they must hire *more* Americans each year, or no cookie. They could still lay people off, but they must replace them with something else. The extra taxes would help pay the unemployment these corporations are causing by their shortsighted layoffs for which they are currently rewarded with higher stock prices.
I also think that if a corporation is based in the US it should have to employ a certain amount of US workers. I have no problem with having people overseas work where it makes sense, and I think that immigrants have a perfect right to come here and work, but I also think it is wrong they are currently being exploited by American citizens, at the detriment of American citizens. That is clearly something we can do something about.
We should pass a law that US-based corporations must follow US labour laws and environmental laws when they go to other people's countries. I am tired of the US having the reputation of the neighbour whose dogs always shit on everyone elese's lawn. These people should be proud Americans who behave themselves with dignity when in someone else's house.
We should also enforce our immigration laws. It is illegal to hire an H1-B for less than the normal wage of the job for which they are hired, and it is illegal to use the H1-B to displace US Workers. However, corporations openly do it and admit it. That should be federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison time for those responsible, a raise for the H1-B worker (it's not their fault, and ultimately this person might become an American one day) and put someone else in charge who knows better.
Survival of the fittest will bite this country in the ass if we let this sort of thing go on forever. You can't let a few people completely ruin the economy of your country and ship all the jobs elsewhere and stay alive. Eventually you have to do something about it.
These people are living in the US, enjoying the freedom and prosperity of the US, while ruining it. Not only that, but they are shipping the work that is important to our infrastructure and defense to known terrorist havens and/or enemies of the US. How much of our important technology has been compromised, trojaned, or simply stolen as a result? What happens when the navigation system for a helicopter gunship starts flashing "Hacked by Chinese" instead of the map?
I say if you live in the US you should do what is best for the country no matter if you are a sanitation engineer, a software engineer, or a CEO. If the corporations truly could not deal with this and left, that's fine with me too because we can make more once they are gone. The difference between the US and these other countries is that we actually invent things and have the entrepeneur spirit required to create companies.
If I were living in India, I would be mad about this too. Not that the US Corporations were giving my countrymen badly-needed jobs, but that more Indians were not starting corporations and creating products to compete with the US instead. India is perfectly capable of producing another Sun with another Solaris, or a better Microsoft, but they haven't. Why is that?
Clearly this situation is not good for India in any case, as they are only being explited and therefore do not have control of their destiny. Already more corporations are shipping the jobs that were US jobs then were Indians' jobs off to China, their enemy. How do you think that makes them feel?
You can bet that Microsoft probably wishes different choices were made. And I'm sure that thousands of Microsoft employees curses the choices that were made daily. Choices that were made against the constraints of the time they were made in.
And the "encryption" you're talking about is either the reversible encryption, or the old "home" computer versions deployed in small workgroups. In which case let me say, "I've also noticed the unsuitability of screw drivers for pounding nails."
But the difference here is that Windows is designed to be insecure. No matter how hard you try, any system will have bugs, because it is designed by humans. But Microsoft has deliberately added "features" to their operating system and made design decisions whihc make it insecure and unstable. They aren't even trying, either because they don't feel that they have to compete, or because they do not care.
The encryption I am talking about is the password encryption for NT and Windows 2000. Firstly, it is weak and recently has proven trivial to crack. Secondly there is the matter of NT sending passwords over the wire to connect to smb file shares, which initially were plaintext, and later were encrypted using this sad encryption in SP4 or so (even then it was possible to turn the encryption off and many did).
You are right about screws being unsuitable for use as nails nails, but then Microsoft products are likewise unsuitable for use in enterprise environments or anywhere that security is even vaguely important.
On TV the other night I watched in disbelief as a Stock Analyst recommend his viewers buy SCO stock. "There's a little problem with the ownership of the operating system," he said, "but we feel it will all be worked out soon enough".
When a stock analyst says that on TV, it means he wants to get rid of some SCO stock and FAST.
Yeah.... just like those Enron and Worldcom execs
The big fish were tossed back, what makes you think little fish will be kept?
Thankfully in the case of Worldcom, criminal charges were finally filed recently... I hope they exile them to Afghanistan, the bastards.
In all seriousness, yes the problem was with Microsoft software, but in reality the patches were available almost full month before the blaster worm was released. As a result, those corporations who had not patched their systems (and blocked the relative ports at the firewalls) should share a LARGE chunk of the blame, but the ultimate blame rests on those who exploited the vulnerabilty, regardless of their motivation. Just because the door is open, doesn't give you the right to come in.
People keep saying that, but the fact of the matter is that the patches that were available a month before did not protect people from some of the worm variants. Microsoft has been patching RPC all year and has still not gotten it right. In the heat the worm infestations (about a week's time) they released four or more patches for these vulnerabilities. Clearly the worm writers kept finding bugs in Microsoft's cruft.
It does not make sense to me that Windows needs an RPC service and won't let you turn it off, anyway. It is ridiculous and an inherent security flaw from the beginning. Likewise their "encryption" that is crackable in 13 seconds for passwords. This of course was supposed to be better than their previous model of sending passwords over the net for no good reason in plaintext. Great.
It does no good to lambast admins by saying "patches were out months ago" when the patches either broke things, did not protect from the $famous_worm_du_jour, or both for good measure, which has been the case with every worm lately.
The logic here is unbelieveable. So if you forget to lock a window in your home, and a burglar comes in and steals your stuff, and the burglar gets caught, YOU should be prosecuted for burglary for leaving the window open?
No, but if the guy who built my house put little windows all over it that only burglars know about, and made sure the ones I do know about are broken such that they are difficult/impossible to keep closed, I would be pretty upset with him, wouldn't you?
We need to start making people take responsibility for their own ACTIONS and quit blaming others. It's like blaming a door-lock manufacturer because someone can pick the lock! There will always be people that take UNLAWFUL advantage of real or perceived situations. That doesn't mean they are any less to blame for their actions.
This door lock manufacturer has designed his door locks specifically to be easily picked on purpose. That is the difference here. Virus writers are wrong, but Microsoft wants a caning as well.
You know, caning definately works, and it doesnt leave any lasting scars, and doesnt cost much....
Ok, let's start caning AC's. Then we can sell access to webcams of it to fund Free Software projects.
I realize that you are joking, but your post is pretty heavy on the garbage. The GPL does not require you to distribute anything. If you _choose_ to distribute it, though, you must follow the terms of the GPL.
But how do you run a worm without distributing it? :)
Yep. And those limits are explicitly stated in the Second Amendment. It guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, not artillery, and the difference between the two was well understood by the men who voted on the thing. Unfortunately, because that basic understanding has passed from the popular consciousness lots of people try to make specious arguments like "You want assault rifles? Well, what about howitzers? What about nukes?" To be fair, there's some crossover between the two categories. The old brightline test of "man-portability" no longer really applies since weapons with the power of artillery pieces can now be carried by one man; there are also rifles too big for one man to practically carry. And U.S. law says almost nothing about certain odd categories of weaponry, like flamethrowers (surprisingly legal and unregulated in most places). Generally, though, the line between arms and artillery is still pretty easy to draw. The Second protects the right to keep and bear the former and provides no such protection for people who want to collect the latter.
The thought of McBride with a nuke is pretty chilling though. Why did you have to conjure up that image for me? :-)
Actually the second amendment specifically recommends military weaponry. After all it does say "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." The writers of this amendment were fully expecting the average person to be proficient with the most advanced weaponry of the day. You have to rememebr at this point there was no standing army and we had just angered the world's greatest superpower. We were standing in the backyard of the other two. To maintain stability and freedom, it would be necessary to defend it.
There have been numerous quotations by the founders of the US and long treatises in which they explain in some detail exactly what is meant by this amendment. Those who seek to dilute it have neither read these nor a dictionary (care to look up the meaning of "abridged?").
The fact of the matter is that there is an extreme disconnect between what is considered "reasonable" today and the intent of the men and women who worked to make this country what it is today. The only real argument against holding to the standards of free speech, free religion, and right to bear arms the progenitors of this nation expected, held and fought for is that "in a reasonable and civilized society we do not need such weaponry" or "you can't really expect to let people get away with saying whatever they like, now can you?" But the people who wrote the constitution and declaration of independence were extremists. They understood that there is no inherent right of government to give people anything at all. Rather, humans have infinite rights and agree to restrictions in order to live together. They recognized that certain of these rights were so inviolable that there was never a good reason to give them up. They took the trouble to write them down. But no one reads these things anymore, so the people they warned us about get away with breaking the law.
Remember, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. If you decide you don't care about rights, then someone will decide to relieve you of them.
Fortunately the doll will say "Lunix sucks" and even agree that it does suck. But if you try to get her to say "Linux" then she says "that's a bad word. We use Windows around here."
runs on a C64 can't be all that grandiose by modern standards.
"That didn`t stop Bush becoming president!!"
I can't decide if the missing "from" is just another layer of clever wit, or run-of-the-mill slashdot sloppiness. Given the content, probably the latter.
Actually "from" would be superfluous in that sentence, though in US English it is commonly used in such contexts. Perhaps the original speaker is a Briton or an Anglophile. Personally, I think it is too bad that US English has degenerated so badly. Most people seem to speak and write little better than chimpanzees on this side of the water.
Generally I am adament in my indecision over this issue, but there are limits. What do you think the likes of McBride would do with a realspace nuke?
Not a whole lot, since he's not bright enough to know how to use it. Heck, I bet he would be confused by the Smith & Wesson interface.
What the world needs is a book on WINDOWS security. Not YABOUS.
This is the answer to your Windows security problem.
Because the uucp uid still owns all the serial port hardware. You need UUCP so that your modems will work, even though they are not running the UUCP protocol.
This is irrational. Presumably you could create any user/group you wanted and give it access to this hardware, so long as the users that the programs that need access to this hardware run as are also part of that group/that user. BUt why mess with perfection? If it works, there is no reason to change it. There is nothing magic about the name uucp. It just happens to be the name chosen by convention.
"Canadians don't have the same free speech rights as the US" What? Are you really that stupid? http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/charter/ Our equivalent of your constitution. The same rules apply, too. If a law is enacted that is in contravention to the Charter, and if it can be proven so, then it can be stricken from the books.
What I am referring to is: " 1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."
Any right guaranteed in the Canadian Charter falls under this limitation. The Canadian Charter specifically gives the government the right to limit the rights of its citizens. By contrast the US Constitution specifically says thet the US Government does not have the right to restrict the rights enumerated therein. The Canadian government has shown that it does indeed interpret the Charter this way through regular censorship. In the US, the government tries to enact censorship but is often stopped because of the guarantees in the US Constitution. Again, most Canadians don't even know about this part of their Charter. Don't feel bad, the number of Americans who read the Constitution has been dropping significantly; far fewer even understand it.
You're thinking of Apollo Diamond, which plans to use revenues from selling vapor deposition gemstones to fund research into diamond semiconductors. There's a nice writeup about synthetic diamonds at E2.
However, in many markets, synthetic diamonds sold as gemstones have to be labeled as synthetic, giving De Beers an out: "A diamond isn't forever if it was grown in a lab five days ago."
Diamonds from vapour? Sounds like vapourware to me! :) Hmm, maybe they are not forever, but instead are "Duke Nukem Forever." That is what happened to it! It was vapour and they made it into diamonds!