I could try to justify it by saying that I already pay for it, that I want it without DRM, that they should provide it in an alternative format, etc... Those aren't very good justifications, if they don't provide it in a format that I want then I should go without. It is their property and their right to determine how they sell it. They are free to make unprofitable business decisions. I have neither the individual power nor control of the collective to ensure that my wants are met by the content producers. I'd guess that 80% of the content I download never gets watched. I think I do it just because they tell me I'm not allowed to.
The "go without" argument will never work. The problem is that it is only unprofitable for the business if the majority of people care about the content. In the real world, most people don't care about the format their content comes in; they don't care if their software is open source; they don't care if there is DRM. They care about exactly one thing: Does the movie I just bought play? If they cannot get the content for free (or it is inconvenient), then they'll just pay whoever will play it.
In other words, the reality is we geeks do not have enough market share to influence the bottom line.
But the real problem here isn't one of profit. Piracy is an excuse to power grab -- and I know that because they've been making the same claims since well before the internet came along, for the same reasons. As long as the content providers have enough power to push for anti-piracy laws (which ultimately give them more power, and do nothing to actually stop piracy), they will do exactly that, whether it is common or not.
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding something, but a particular application should not depend on what desktop environment is running, since Gtk is primarily responsible for drawing. They may not interoperate with other applications, but they should run.
Having said that, it seems like there are basically two ways to go if Gtk+3 applications won't run outside of Gnome. The one I hope for is that the smaller window managers will support Gtk+ 3 (or, conversely, distributions continue to support Gtk+ 2). The alternative is that I'm forced either into using Gnome/KDE or using outdated software. The latter option bothers me deeply, so whatever work I am able to contribute to prevent it, I do.
I have found that Gnome3 has some significant irritants that Gnome2 did not have. I found it cumbersome to actually get work done with, not completely unlike the way Unity is difficult to work with. The changes that were made (such as removing the taskbar, for example.) are arbitrary as far as I can tell. We've had literally decades to figure out good fundamentals, and while I'm not opposed to experimenting with user interfaces, doing it to the most widely used interface seems obnoxious. Especially among geeks, who develop habits and scripts around the tools they regularly use, such changes either need to be rolled out slowly or presented as an option.
I'm not trying to say that Gnome3 is useless. It is pretty much standard now, but saying that "it won't bite" ignores some significant problems. There are other options, whose only limitations are that Gnome and KDE applications seem to like their respective desktop environments to be running, and they're worth paying attention to. After all, this is Linux, these are geeks -- being "the standard" has never been a good reason to use something before, why start now?
I've found that pulling tools together from desktop environments other than KDE and Gnome and just using a few of the indispensable apps from them is the best way to go. For example, I use Thunar instead of Nautilus or Dolphin. The simpler desktop environments tend to have more portable components, not as tied to their parent.
Then again, except for a web browser, e-mail, and feed reader, the majority of my time is spent on a terminal anyway, so I may be the outlier here.
I planned on giving it another go in a while, but I tried the phone option, it told me the key wasn't usable with no details, and provided no further options. I suppose this shows how often I deal with windows:).
My problem with DRM is not that I'm a pirate -- I'm not. I try whenever possible to abide by copyright law. But it DRM legitimately gets in the way of getting things done.
Consider, a few days ago, my VirtualBox drive with windows XP died (primarily human error, admittedly.). Restoring to a previous point didn't fix it, so I had to reinstall. But -- Oh Noes! -- I had used my product key too many times. Even if they don't give a limit, there clearly is one -- the same key stopped working. (For the record: I purchased this copy of XP.)
I had to turn to an activation hack to get my legally purchased, still functional, still useful software running. Microsoft, of course, won't restore my key.
This is why I steadfastly avoid any and all DRM-crippled software whenever and wherever I can. The End-Of-Life from the company's standpoint is likely to be long before I think the product is dead.
While I generally agree, it should be noted that, in practice, bitcoin is already marginalized, and any connection to criminal activity could shed a bad light on it. If it loses reputation this early in the game due to bad/inaccurate reporting, or the inability of irrational sheep to distinguish the currency from the means of obtaining it, then that would be very bad for bitcoin.
I'm just curious which bug this is. I use FF3.6, and I haven't noticed losing any tabs. And I generally keep careful tabs on them (pun intended). Not that I doubt you experiencing this, but I'd love to read up on it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Wayland doesn't claim to replace X -- at least not entirely. It's suggesting that X should be an add-on component, rather than the core process.
From the FAQ:
This doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Wayland, it just means that you will have to put a remote rendering server on top of Wayland. One such server could be the X.org server, but other options include an RDP server, a VNC server or somebody could even invent their own new remote rendering model. Which is a feature when you think about it; layering X.org on top of Wayland has very little overhead, but the other types of remote rendering servers no longer requires X.org, and experimenting with new protocols is easier.
It sounds to me like X is supposed to be an optional component, to support legacy code and/or remote machines, etc. -- but isn't the only option. Wayland just takes over the one particular part of the process (just compositing on screen).
Admittedly, I haven't read a lot about wayland. Until this article, I'd never heard of it (perhaps showing how little I've kept up on tech news lately). But, out of genuine curiosity, how is this going to ruin the flexibility of X?
They are not, actually, antonyms of one another. Consider a web of trust, using pseudonyms. That is an anonymous system. You are accountable based on who is willing to trust you -- if you behave badly, and lose your reputation, you lose trust in your communications. Even if this isn't explicitly coded, it happens almost by accident -- common forum dwellers are known by their handles, and trusted for their previous work, for example.
What anonymity implies is a lack of ability to provide civil/criminal/physical accountability -- psychological and social accountability still remain.
Or, phrased another way, it's a question of who you are accountable to. If you need to have accountability from the government, educational institutions, corporations, etc. -- then, of course, anonymity is impossible to maintain. However, if you need behavioral accountability, accountability to the community (whatever community that may be), then reputation is sufficient, along with filtering or web-of-trust-type systems to enforce it. Anonymity does not prevent this.
A) The rest of the solution would be to use reputations, cryptographic keys (optionally), and so forth. Reputations seems to be sufficient, most of the time.
B) Well, an easy way would be to prevent one IP address from registering more than one username per, say, a day -- which would be fine for a household of users that want accounts, but not useful to spammers.
If someone is willing to put up the effort to run a botnet and register on that many different accounts -- well, why wouldn't they just use automated software like Rig to create 1,000,000 fake identities that are equally acceptable as a real name (leaving aside impractical requirements like presenting a passport to get an account). Not much you can do to stop someone determined enough to spam, but then you just rely on reputation to weed out the bad accounts, as per A) above.
I have generally felt that social networks are besides the point. Real Life(tm) is the ultimate social network, and any communication medium -- be it forums, e-mail, snail mail, talking on the sidewalk, or phoning a friend -- all contribute to that network, without the assistance of Facebook or the like.
If you want to find a person, Facebook (may be) a free way to do it, assuming they use it and were willing to give their real name to them. But other methods exist -- including: Search engines, public networks, potentially shared acquaintances (finding someone from high school? Try asking other friends from high school. Or their parents, if you're that sort of person.)
Pseudonyms do NOT interfere with this. If I tell my friends that I am "jakykong" online, they can tell their friends to contact Jakykong for something. Thus the two-step distant people don't know my real name, but the one-step distant people do. No technology involved, and no real name required.
Of course, our modern concept of social networks that allow you to search for someone by name, rather than by common acquaintances or activities, probably need the real name to facilitate that. But I don't require that functionality -- the ability to meet my friends' friends is useful, whether or not I know their names. Facebook and now Google+ deny this functionality when they deny pseudonyms.
Why would the evil sudo need to be setuid? It just forks the real sudo and keeps track of the I/O, thus gaining the password. No need to replace sudo when you could use the real thing.
Easier: an alias in your ~/.profile. alias "sudo=/home/user/.hidden/script-that-acts-like-sudo would probably be sufficient, and, if written right, it'd get the user to type their password, convince the user that they made a typo, and then remove any trace that it was there, except that now it has a record of the password. This would work no matter what terminal the user prefers, even if it's ssh, and it doesn't require anything except a simple shell script to be run with user-level privileges to inject it.
Of course, it depends on the user not noticing the alias in their.profile, but how often do you actually look at that file these days?
That's probably true. But the lecture classes I've been in (granted, community college, not university (yet)) have had instructors that could tell, if not to the day, at least how frequently a student tended to appear. In a class of 60-70 students, this isn't much of a problem for the instructor to intuit. In a class of 300-400 students, the instructor probably isn't doing most of the tutoring anyway, leaving it to the TA's.
In short, you generally don't need to track attendance for an instructor to figure out whether a student shows up regularly or not. (And it may be irrelevant anyway, depending on how the instructor is payed for such questions.)
I believe that situation is why he stored two encrypted copies, one of which was with his asymmetric key (hence, can't be changed by someone else, assuming the key is secure).
One could postulate for any given observed event and it's (non-supernatural) cause, that the said cause is simply the mechanism by which a deity causes that observed event. For example, one might postulate that God causes arrows to fly when fired. The non-supernatural explanation is that the tension on the bowstring accelerates the arrow. This could be explained as the mechanism by which God causes arrows to fly.
But such an explanation is not parsimonious. It has an extra assumption (I.E., that God is affecting arrows) which is not necessary to explain the observation. A sufficiently broad and abstract notion of God encompasses everything and explains exactly nothing (as per the deistic viewpoint). It is an error in reasoning, therefore, to conclude that NDE's are, despite ketamine's effect on a person, nevertheless related to heaven (unless/until further observations warrant this hypothesis). That the ketamine simply causes a hallucination (as many other chemicals can do) is a much simpler explanation, and, as such, more likely to be correct.
I will note that the problem of induction (I.e., any induction can be definitively refuted but not definitively confirmed) means that nothing can ever completely rule out supernatural involvement in anything. This experiment only shows that heaven is not necessary to explain NDE's. But saying that something is supernaturally caused says, precisely, that we cannot explain it (by definition); it just doesn't accomplish anything.
In the Facebook and Twitter era, the concept of "common knowledge" seems to be a tautology. If you already share everything except your password, then nothing at all makes a good security question; all someone needs is a Facebook account to look up whatever answers they need/want.
Nobody has really mentioned dimmers yet. I use CFLs in much of the house -- kitchen, bathroom, etc., but stick to incandescent in my bed room simply because I like to dim the light about half-way when I hit the sack and read for a while.
Generally, Synaptic is easier than most windows installers (IMO, although it appears IYO as well), as long as you know what package it is that you're looking for (or at least have some good idea).
Synaptic presents a list of 27,712 packages to me (Deb Squeeze), a large percentage of those are software which I don't know anything about -- and the descriptions in Synaptic are very frequently not enough to tell me something about them. (Although a quick Google usually does) Some of them -- like kernels and libraries -- are utterly cryptic unless you already know something about them.
Windows solves that problem through advertising. Microsoft, Adobe, Nero, Roxio -- names that are recognizable quickly, because they're advertised so much. The result is that users of windows, even when they themselves don't know what they want, often know the piece of software that does it.
KDE has an interesting package manager available, which is highly simplified and shows only what users might classify as "applications", in categories end users would easily comprehend. If I were a user of the "end user" variety, I would find that helpful, because knowing to install the package called "kopete" or "pidgin" to get instant messaging is not as easy as seeing "Instant Messaging" in the categories and then picking one (or even having a default picked). This certainly goes a long way to solving the problem as well (if such a tactic is widely adopted, that is).
So, I guess it depends on what you're looking at when you consider installation easy. The actual act of installation, or the act of finding which packages it is that you want to install -- because the first is generally the roadblock for users, not as often the second. And the open source tendency to use acronyms and puns doesn't help that matter, fun though they may be.
(For the record, I did install Ubuntu on my mother's computer; and it's worked out fine. In fact, finding packages seems to be the only difficulty she has on a daily basis.)
I might note that this is true if the neighbor in question has an ISP that doesn't limit data transfer. On the other hand, if your neighbor does have transfer limits (250Gb for Comcast, presently. Not sure about others.), then you *are* depriving him of that data transfer.
Slashdot Mirror
I could try to justify it by saying that I already pay for it, that I want it without DRM, that they should provide it in an alternative format, etc... Those aren't very good justifications, if they don't provide it in a format that I want then I should go without. It is their property and their right to determine how they sell it. They are free to make unprofitable business decisions. I have neither the individual power nor control of the collective to ensure that my wants are met by the content producers. I'd guess that 80% of the content I download never gets watched. I think I do it just because they tell me I'm not allowed to.
The "go without" argument will never work. The problem is that it is only unprofitable for the business if the majority of people care about the content. In the real world, most people don't care about the format their content comes in; they don't care if their software is open source; they don't care if there is DRM. They care about exactly one thing: Does the movie I just bought play? If they cannot get the content for free (or it is inconvenient), then they'll just pay whoever will play it.
In other words, the reality is we geeks do not have enough market share to influence the bottom line.
But the real problem here isn't one of profit. Piracy is an excuse to power grab -- and I know that because they've been making the same claims since well before the internet came along, for the same reasons. As long as the content providers have enough power to push for anti-piracy laws (which ultimately give them more power, and do nothing to actually stop piracy), they will do exactly that, whether it is common or not.
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding something, but a particular application should not depend on what desktop environment is running, since Gtk is primarily responsible for drawing. They may not interoperate with other applications, but they should run.
Having said that, it seems like there are basically two ways to go if Gtk+3 applications won't run outside of Gnome. The one I hope for is that the smaller window managers will support Gtk+ 3 (or, conversely, distributions continue to support Gtk+ 2). The alternative is that I'm forced either into using Gnome/KDE or using outdated software. The latter option bothers me deeply, so whatever work I am able to contribute to prevent it, I do.
I have found that Gnome3 has some significant irritants that Gnome2 did not have. I found it cumbersome to actually get work done with, not completely unlike the way Unity is difficult to work with. The changes that were made (such as removing the taskbar, for example.) are arbitrary as far as I can tell. We've had literally decades to figure out good fundamentals, and while I'm not opposed to experimenting with user interfaces, doing it to the most widely used interface seems obnoxious. Especially among geeks, who develop habits and scripts around the tools they regularly use, such changes either need to be rolled out slowly or presented as an option.
I'm not trying to say that Gnome3 is useless. It is pretty much standard now, but saying that "it won't bite" ignores some significant problems. There are other options, whose only limitations are that Gnome and KDE applications seem to like their respective desktop environments to be running, and they're worth paying attention to. After all, this is Linux, these are geeks -- being "the standard" has never been a good reason to use something before, why start now?
I've found that pulling tools together from desktop environments other than KDE and Gnome and just using a few of the indispensable apps from them is the best way to go. For example, I use Thunar instead of Nautilus or Dolphin. The simpler desktop environments tend to have more portable components, not as tied to their parent.
Then again, except for a web browser, e-mail, and feed reader, the majority of my time is spent on a terminal anyway, so I may be the outlier here.
I'm pretty sure the parent post was thinking that we could thereby get Chrome and/or Firefox onto the IE6 user's machine.
I planned on giving it another go in a while, but I tried the phone option, it told me the key wasn't usable with no details, and provided no further options. I suppose this shows how often I deal with windows :).
why the hell would anyone program a car to behave like a cat?
Whoosh.
My problem with DRM is not that I'm a pirate -- I'm not. I try whenever possible to abide by copyright law. But it DRM legitimately gets in the way of getting things done.
Consider, a few days ago, my VirtualBox drive with windows XP died (primarily human error, admittedly.). Restoring to a previous point didn't fix it, so I had to reinstall. But -- Oh Noes! -- I had used my product key too many times. Even if they don't give a limit, there clearly is one -- the same key stopped working. (For the record: I purchased this copy of XP.)
I had to turn to an activation hack to get my legally purchased, still functional, still useful software running. Microsoft, of course, won't restore my key.
This is why I steadfastly avoid any and all DRM-crippled software whenever and wherever I can. The End-Of-Life from the company's standpoint is likely to be long before I think the product is dead.
While I generally agree, it should be noted that, in practice, bitcoin is already marginalized, and any connection to criminal activity could shed a bad light on it. If it loses reputation this early in the game due to bad/inaccurate reporting, or the inability of irrational sheep to distinguish the currency from the means of obtaining it, then that would be very bad for bitcoin.
I'm just curious which bug this is. I use FF3.6, and I haven't noticed losing any tabs. And I generally keep careful tabs on them (pun intended). Not that I doubt you experiencing this, but I'd love to read up on it.
From the FAQ:
This doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Wayland, it just means that you will have to put a remote rendering server on top of Wayland. One such server could be the X.org server, but other options include an RDP server, a VNC server or somebody could even invent their own new remote rendering model. Which is a feature when you think about it; layering X.org on top of Wayland has very little overhead, but the other types of remote rendering servers no longer requires X.org, and experimenting with new protocols is easier.
It sounds to me like X is supposed to be an optional component, to support legacy code and/or remote machines, etc. -- but isn't the only option. Wayland just takes over the one particular part of the process (just compositing on screen).
Admittedly, I haven't read a lot about wayland. Until this article, I'd never heard of it (perhaps showing how little I've kept up on tech news lately). But, out of genuine curiosity, how is this going to ruin the flexibility of X?
They are not, actually, antonyms of one another. Consider a web of trust, using pseudonyms. That is an anonymous system. You are accountable based on who is willing to trust you -- if you behave badly, and lose your reputation, you lose trust in your communications. Even if this isn't explicitly coded, it happens almost by accident -- common forum dwellers are known by their handles, and trusted for their previous work, for example.
What anonymity implies is a lack of ability to provide civil/criminal/physical accountability -- psychological and social accountability still remain.
Or, phrased another way, it's a question of who you are accountable to. If you need to have accountability from the government, educational institutions, corporations, etc. -- then, of course, anonymity is impossible to maintain. However, if you need behavioral accountability, accountability to the community (whatever community that may be), then reputation is sufficient, along with filtering or web-of-trust-type systems to enforce it. Anonymity does not prevent this.
A) The rest of the solution would be to use reputations, cryptographic keys (optionally), and so forth. Reputations seems to be sufficient, most of the time.
B) Well, an easy way would be to prevent one IP address from registering more than one username per, say, a day -- which would be fine for a household of users that want accounts, but not useful to spammers.
If someone is willing to put up the effort to run a botnet and register on that many different accounts -- well, why wouldn't they just use automated software like Rig to create 1,000,000 fake identities that are equally acceptable as a real name (leaving aside impractical requirements like presenting a passport to get an account). Not much you can do to stop someone determined enough to spam, but then you just rely on reputation to weed out the bad accounts, as per A) above.
I have generally felt that social networks are besides the point. Real Life(tm) is the ultimate social network, and any communication medium -- be it forums, e-mail, snail mail, talking on the sidewalk, or phoning a friend -- all contribute to that network, without the assistance of Facebook or the like.
If you want to find a person, Facebook (may be) a free way to do it, assuming they use it and were willing to give their real name to them. But other methods exist -- including: Search engines, public networks, potentially shared acquaintances (finding someone from high school? Try asking other friends from high school. Or their parents, if you're that sort of person.)
Pseudonyms do NOT interfere with this. If I tell my friends that I am "jakykong" online, they can tell their friends to contact Jakykong for something. Thus the two-step distant people don't know my real name, but the one-step distant people do. No technology involved, and no real name required.
Of course, our modern concept of social networks that allow you to search for someone by name, rather than by common acquaintances or activities, probably need the real name to facilitate that. But I don't require that functionality -- the ability to meet my friends' friends is useful, whether or not I know their names. Facebook and now Google+ deny this functionality when they deny pseudonyms.
Whoosh.
Sleep is one of the great gifts that we are granted as humans.
I see the propaganda has gotten to you! 8 hours of sleep a night -- bah! Computers don't sleep; why should I?
Why would the evil sudo need to be setuid? It just forks the real sudo and keeps track of the I/O, thus gaining the password. No need to replace sudo when you could use the real thing.
Easier: an alias in your ~/.profile. alias "sudo=/home/user/.hidden/script-that-acts-like-sudo would probably be sufficient, and, if written right, it'd get the user to type their password, convince the user that they made a typo, and then remove any trace that it was there, except that now it has a record of the password. This would work no matter what terminal the user prefers, even if it's ssh, and it doesn't require anything except a simple shell script to be run with user-level privileges to inject it.
.profile, but how often do you actually look at that file these days?
Of course, it depends on the user not noticing the alias in their
That's probably true. But the lecture classes I've been in (granted, community college, not university (yet)) have had instructors that could tell, if not to the day, at least how frequently a student tended to appear. In a class of 60-70 students, this isn't much of a problem for the instructor to intuit. In a class of 300-400 students, the instructor probably isn't doing most of the tutoring anyway, leaving it to the TA's.
In short, you generally don't need to track attendance for an instructor to figure out whether a student shows up regularly or not. (And it may be irrelevant anyway, depending on how the instructor is payed for such questions.)
I believe that situation is why he stored two encrypted copies, one of which was with his asymmetric key (hence, can't be changed by someone else, assuming the key is secure).
Easy detail to miss, but oh so important.
That's what Ockham's Razor is for.
One could postulate for any given observed event and it's (non-supernatural) cause, that the said cause is simply the mechanism by which a deity causes that observed event. For example, one might postulate that God causes arrows to fly when fired. The non-supernatural explanation is that the tension on the bowstring accelerates the arrow. This could be explained as the mechanism by which God causes arrows to fly.
But such an explanation is not parsimonious. It has an extra assumption (I.E., that God is affecting arrows) which is not necessary to explain the observation. A sufficiently broad and abstract notion of God encompasses everything and explains exactly nothing (as per the deistic viewpoint). It is an error in reasoning, therefore, to conclude that NDE's are, despite ketamine's effect on a person, nevertheless related to heaven (unless/until further observations warrant this hypothesis). That the ketamine simply causes a hallucination (as many other chemicals can do) is a much simpler explanation, and, as such, more likely to be correct.
I will note that the problem of induction (I.e., any induction can be definitively refuted but not definitively confirmed) means that nothing can ever completely rule out supernatural involvement in anything. This experiment only shows that heaven is not necessary to explain NDE's. But saying that something is supernaturally caused says, precisely, that we cannot explain it (by definition); it just doesn't accomplish anything.
In the Facebook and Twitter era, the concept of "common knowledge" seems to be a tautology. If you already share everything except your password, then nothing at all makes a good security question; all someone needs is a Facebook account to look up whatever answers they need/want.
Just my $0.02.
Nobody has really mentioned dimmers yet. I use CFLs in much of the house -- kitchen, bathroom, etc., but stick to incandescent in my bed room simply because I like to dim the light about half-way when I hit the sack and read for a while.
;)
Haven't found a CFL yet that I can read by.
Generally, Synaptic is easier than most windows installers (IMO, although it appears IYO as well), as long as you know what package it is that you're looking for (or at least have some good idea).
Synaptic presents a list of 27,712 packages to me (Deb Squeeze), a large percentage of those are software which I don't know anything about -- and the descriptions in Synaptic are very frequently not enough to tell me something about them. (Although a quick Google usually does) Some of them -- like kernels and libraries -- are utterly cryptic unless you already know something about them.
Windows solves that problem through advertising. Microsoft, Adobe, Nero, Roxio -- names that are recognizable quickly, because they're advertised so much. The result is that users of windows, even when they themselves don't know what they want, often know the piece of software that does it.
KDE has an interesting package manager available, which is highly simplified and shows only what users might classify as "applications", in categories end users would easily comprehend. If I were a user of the "end user" variety, I would find that helpful, because knowing to install the package called "kopete" or "pidgin" to get instant messaging is not as easy as seeing "Instant Messaging" in the categories and then picking one (or even having a default picked). This certainly goes a long way to solving the problem as well (if such a tactic is widely adopted, that is).
So, I guess it depends on what you're looking at when you consider installation easy. The actual act of installation, or the act of finding which packages it is that you want to install -- because the first is generally the roadblock for users, not as often the second. And the open source tendency to use acronyms and puns doesn't help that matter, fun though they may be.
(For the record, I did install Ubuntu on my mother's computer; and it's worked out fine. In fact, finding packages seems to be the only difficulty she has on a daily basis.)
Neither deprives the neighbor of a thing.
I might note that this is true if the neighbor in question has an ISP that doesn't limit data transfer. On the other hand, if your neighbor does have transfer limits (250Gb for Comcast, presently. Not sure about others.), then you *are* depriving him of that data transfer.