1905. CHRISTIANS: We should teach religion in schools. SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY: No, we should not teach religion in schools. COURTS: Yeah, pretty much. (Pause.)
1955. CHRISTIANS: We should teach "creationism" in schools. SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY: Um, that's the exact same thing as before. You're just calling it "creationism" instead of "religion". And you shouldn't teach religion in schools. COURTS: Yeah, pretty much. (Pause.)
2005. CHRISTIANS: We should teach "intelligent design" in schools. SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY: Um, that's still the exact same thing as before. You're just calling it "intelligent design" instead of "creationism". And you still shouldn't teach religion in schools. COURTS: Yeah, pretty much. (Pause.)
2055. SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY: We should teach science in schools. COURTS: Citizen, you have committed an Error. Please stand by until an armed guard can escort you to a Free Speech Zone. CHRISTIANS: Man, living in a hyperbolic hypothetical example rocks!
Congratulations; it would appear that you have successfully learned to use the "copy and paste" function of your computer. It would appear you have also learned how to insult people.
If you can continue to apply these skills, you should do well at slashdot.org.
In the meantime, though, perhaps we should round out the set of fuzzy feel-good quotes from this blog with, oh, I don't know, the actual allegations that these fuzzy feel-good quotes are supposedly refuting. I'm not too familiar with the ins and outs of early-80s PC software myself, but this seems as good a source for that as any. It is some sort of document filed with the U.S. courts by the Consumer Federation of America in protest of the antitrust "settlement" which allowed Microsoft to avoid the remedy/punishment phase of their recent antitrust trial. Let's see:
Footnote 63: The practice [of freezing out competitors with incompatibilities] was deeply embedded in the business strategy, although it was refined over time. Wallace and Erickson offer the following example from 1982-83 (p. 233).
Still, for a very brief time in early 1983, Multiplan did enjoy an advantage over 1-2-3. Microsoft released its upgrade for he IBM PC/XT, causing problems for 1-2-3 on the updated operating system. According to one Microsoft programmer, the problems encountered by Lotus were not unexpected. A few of the key people working on DOS 2.0, he claimed, had a saying at the time, DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." They managed to code a few hidden bugs into DOS 2.0 that caused Lotus to break down when it loaded. "There were as few as three or four people who knew what was being done," he said. He felt the highly competitive Gates was the ringleader.
The art had apparently been refined by the early 1990s (Wallace, p. 38-39).
"He denied there was a Chinese Wall at Microsoft," Schmidt wrote in his notebook, "and clearly stated that the software groups throughout all of Microsoft's Corporation talked to all others. He claimed that the use of hidden APIs was an error by the team" The hidden APIs referred to by Schmidt are applications programming interfaces, or "calls," programming codes integrated into an operating system such as Windows to allow it to respond to commands from an application program. If competitors don't know about these hidden or undocumented calls, their applications will not work as well as Microsoft's Microsoft had long denied that it deliberately designed hidden calls into its operating systems, but in the summer of 1992, Andrew Schulman, a programming expert living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published a book Undocumented Windows, which confirmed that Microsoft had lied. Microsoft later acknowledged that Excel and Word used at least 16 APIs that had been hidden in Windows.
You're seriously suggesting a system under which a government source would be perfectly anonymous not only to the newspaper's readers, not only to the newspaper, but to the reporters themselves?
I see. That sounds like a wonderful idea. For me, at least. Because if such a system existed, I would set myself up as an "anonymous high-ranking administration official" immediately. I mean, I'm a random computer programmer in Indiana. But the newspapers don't know that, do they? I'm anonymous. So give me a year and I'll have the New York Times printing that the Bush administration plans to use nuclear missles against Idaho.
(And if you have any doubt they'll trust my word, remember: they trusted Ahmed Chalabi.)
This is the same crowd that up until TODAY said that more than one button would lead to widespread panic, confusion, and anarchy. Now two buttons plus a programmable surface and a cursor that looks like it was stolen from a Thinkpad is perfection.
Um, except that if you'd actually asked any of that crowd "and what mouse do YOU use?" I guarantee you somewhere around or above half would have let you know they have a third-party two-button USB scrollwheel mouse on their personal macs, despite their defense of Apple's use of a one-button mouse in general. Surely you could not have failed to notice the disturbingly high frequency of posts in every single Apple thread saying something like "...but you can buy a mouse with more buttons, just not from apple..."? They were trying to tell you something.
Or, in other words, the members of this crowd, at least the ones that hang out on slashdot, in general tend to consider one-button mice inappropriate for low-end users. That is, these people would consider the multi-button mice something which is all well and good for power users (often including themselves) but which is not good for everyone-- and furthermore conclude that since a single mouse design can't please everyone, the low-end users should be the ones whom the computer's pack-in mice should please. Therefore, Apple's long-held decision to stay with one-button mice for the pack-in mouse would be the right one, since the low-end users are pleased by default and the power users can surely handle an operation like "go buy a mouse" on their own.
So from the above viewpoint, Apple's new programmable mouse thingy is the best of all possible worlds, since it entirely upsets the assumption above that one mouse can't please everybody-- because this one can. It can behave like a one-button mouse for low-end users or a two-button scrollmouse for high-end users with just a change in software configuration. I mean, I won't be buying one, but I can definitely see the attraction here.
So your way of putting things isn't exactly fair. But, hey, I guess it's easier to misrepresent people's views to make them look hypocritical than it is to try to understand what they're saying.
Same rhetoric as it was for the x86 chips. x86 was terrible until Apple adopted it, right?
I wouldn't know about this one, since I think the decision to move to x86 is a terrible one, I think Apple is handling the transition extremely poorly, and as a result I am seriously considering researching my alternatives the next time I buy a computer.
Interestingly, when I voiced this opinion on Slashdot, I was forcefully yelled at for being an "apple zealot". From the combination of this and your comment here, I can only conclude that if you're a mac user, you will be denounced for being an apple zealot if you agree with Apple's decision to move to x86 and denounced for being an apple zealot if you disagree with Apple's decision to move to x86. Hm.
Because if America is superior to China, a still-stalinist-in-many-ways entity that probably qualifies as the most successful fascist nation in the world, then Americans don't need extralegal protections on their freedom of speech?
Wait, no. That's silly. There's a massive gray area between "Stalinist China" and "free", and anyway, America being superior to China now says nothing about the future. One would think that strengthening our guarantee to freedom of speech through technical as well as legal means could only be a good thing.
In the meantime, the government is far from the only entity which "political dissidents", as your quote puts it, might have to fear; any number of private or corporate entities, or persons, might be fully capable of in some way retaliating against some individual for exercising their speech, and in such circumstances the individual would generally have no legal recourse to first amendment rights.
Except, oh wait, it appears you feel that way already:
If you're looking for trampling of free speech, you needn't look to the government; you need only look no further than our own academic institutions. [thefire.org]
Oh, wait, never mind. And here I thought you were actually trying to discuss freenet, or the article. Nope, it looks like you're just trying to create a straw man by implying that the article means to speak of "dissidents" as only needing to fear the government, all so that you can tear it down by plugging a right-wing organization which exists to demonize academic institutions just for getting all huffy when people speak out against minorities. Which all may well be a suitible or potentially interesting topic for discussion, but seems almost entirely offtopic for this article.
Early on in the case, this would have been a huge big revelation; a sort of a... "Wait, you mean SCO is basing their entire future around denouncing UNIX license fees not being paid by people who aren't even using UNIX... yet SCO allegedly isn't paying the license fees for their real UNIX?"
...but now now we've gotten to the point where literally no amount of lying, theft or abuse on the part of SCO can surprise us, this little tidbit will slide right past the media as nothing but a footnote and a handful of slashdot comments.
And lets not forget, once China gets their human rights issues resolved, there's tons of profit to be made.
Unfortunately "China gets their human rights issues resolved" is much less likely to mean "China stops human rights abuses" than it is to mean "America convinces its citizens to stop caring about China's human rights abuses".
And, frankly, it seems that China's human rights issues are probably already almost "resolved" in this sense at this point.
I think something is very, very wrong when we base a company's perceived future viability not on "does it have money?" or "is it making money?", but apparently solely on "does it have a big corporate sugar daddy to support it regardless of its fortunes?"
Isn't HD-DVD's one big touted advantage supposed to be, and correct me if I'm recalling wrong here, easy backwards compatability?
As far as I'm aware, the advantage is and always has been easy backward compatibility for the content industries. From the consumer perspective, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be equally backward compatible with DVD, and both will achieve this backward compatibility in the same way-- by adding a third laser to the two which DVD drives already possess (one laser for CD frequencies, one laser for DVD frequencies, one laser for the "blue" HD disc frequencies).
In fact from the consumer perspective if anything Blu-Ray is more backward compatible than HD-DVD-- because it is possible to manufacture Blu-Ray discs which can be placed in a standard DVD or CD player, and which appear as DVDs to a DVD player and Blu-Rays to a Blu-Ray player. (However, it is unclear if any such Blu-Ray discs will ever be manufactured, and anyway it may not be too late for HD-DVD to adopt this same feature.)
The tauted "backward compatibility" of HD-DVD is, as noted above, from the perspective of a content producer. That is to say, you can manufacture HD-DVDs in the same machines you manufacture DVDs in, with some slight upgrades. If you wish to manufacture Blu-Ray discs, you must buy a new machine. Of course, we are told, if it is cheaper to manufacture HD-DVDs than Blu-Ray discs because you don't have to buy new machines, then the discs will be cheaper for the consumer as well. Hooray for trickle-down economics!
And of course from the perspective of a content producer, forcing your cattle, I mean consumers, to buy new "secure" equipment-- as HD-DVD does and Blu-Ray probably will-- is a big plus.
The end result is that HDMI is a preferable solution going forward. Most likely it is going to win out; we're just going to have to accept the associated DRM.
My understanding is that HDCP (the "associated DRM" in HDMI) is not part of HDMI, but rather a separate layer which may be placed on top of either HDMI or DVI.
Blu-Ray is going into American homes anyway, because it's part of the PS3 and it's probably too late for Sony to back out of that now even if they want to. Even if retailers don't want it, even if Blu-Ray fails miserably as a video format, or even if both HDDVD and Blu-Ray fail miserably as video formats and stores refuse to stock them, there are still going to be the Blu-Ray players and discs out there-- because that's what PS3 games are stored on, and this is going to happen with or without the video features ever being used. And this is going to start early next year, probably long before HDDVD players or discs become available.
Moreover, Blu-Ray isn't going to hurt the PS3-- since if Blu-Ray movies turn out to never happen, then from a consumer perspective all three video game consoles have the exact same video playback features (they all three play DVDs, though the Revolution requires an adapter and the PS3 has the additional optional bluray ability).
The client prepares the KRB_TGS_REQ message, providing an authentication header as an element of the
padata field, and including the same fields as used in the KRB_AS_REQ message along with several optional fields: the enc-authorization- data field for application server use and additional tickets required by some options.
And then later on, multiple things to the effect of:
authorization-data[10] AuthorizationData
OPTIONAL
The "data authorizaton" you refer to is-- by the spec-- clearly referred to as "optional" every time it comes up. This means that spec implementors are under no obligation to observe its contents. Now, if you go and look up the original problems with the MS Kerberos extension:
From discussions with Microsoft, which were not under an NDA, the situation appeared to be as follows circa October, 1997. This information comes from the USENIX publication;Login.
NT 5.0 will indeed use Kerberos. However, the protocol has been "extended" by Microsoft, by adding a digitally signed Privilege Attribute Certificate (PAC) to the Kerberos ticket. The PAC will contain information about the user's 128-bit NT unique id, as well as a list of groups to which the user belongs.
The NT PAC is unfortunately not compatible with the PAC's used by the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). It is also somewhat debatable whether the NT PAC is legal with respect to RFC-1510, the IETF Kerberos V5 protocol specification. The original intent of RFC-1510 prohibited what Microsoft was trying to do, but Microsoft found what they claimed to be a loophole in RFC-1510 specification.
Many folks, including Paul Hill and Ted T'so at MIT, as well as Cliff Neumann at ISI, have tried to work with Microsoft to find a more compatible way of doing what they wanted to do. To that end, we made changes in the upcoming revision of RFC-1510 to add a clean and compatible way of adding extensions such as Microsoft's PAC to the Kerberos ticket.
To Microsoft's credit, they agreed to change NT 5.0 to use a cleaner and more compatible way of adding extensions to the Kerberos V5 ticket... [snip]
RFC 1510 specifies that the encrypted part of a ticket may include an optional AuthorizationData field. If the authorization-data are present, they are decrypted using the sub-session key from the authenticator.... [specified encoding of authorization-data field follows]
Microsoft has not fully disclosed their use of the authorization data field. However some information is public knowledge at this time.... [partial, reverse-engineered microsoft encoding of authorization-data field follows]
So what we are left with is this. The Microsoft kerberos extensions took a field clearly marked in the spec as "optional" and made it non-optional, while other implementations took the optional field and ignored it. Ignoring an optional field would be a correct implementation of the specification; requiring it would not. Meanwhile by the information above, the data Microsoft carried in the field is not only seemingly not the proper encoding of the AuthorizationData field given by the spec, but contains information which was not only outside the scope of the spec, but arbitrarily defined by microsoft and then NOT PUBLICLY DOCUMENTED. Microsoft claims a "loophole" not specified justifies this, but if you use a "loophole" to add information to a protocol which breaks compatibility with existing implementations you cannot possibly blame anyone but yourself for this.
It would appear you either are misinformed or trying to mislead us.
Do you see the little foot, the one displayed next to the headline?
It means something.
I'm actually finding this whole thing amusing because I last week was looking around on google maps trying to find specific things, and one of the things I decided to specifically look for was the WTC site. Sure enough, it's just a flat construction site. So for me this article is a "hey, I was just looking at that" sort of thing. What I really found interesting at the time though was once I found the WTC site I started zooming out... the little beige hole in the middle of Manhattan where the WTC used to be is still clearly visible all the way out until you've zoomed out past the entire state of New Jersey...
Anyone who previously thought that the ESRB was a good idea and defended it on the basis that if the industry self-regulated it would provide a bulwhark against censorship from outside has just been proven wrong.
The ESRB has been demonstrated a tool for censorship from outside, as demonstrated by the fact that a game has just been effectively banned from sale in the U.S., by way of it being moved from M to AO, based on nothing but a targeted public smear campaign. The content even in the modded "AO" version of GTA:SA is significantly tamer than the sexual content that which is already present in a very large number of M games.
Anyone within the Hillary Clinton / etc "blame video games" camp who previously claimed that they just cared about protecting "the children" has just been shown to be lying.
This has been demonstrated by their extended attack on a game that was already "mature, 17 or older only, not to be sold to minors" with a "strong sexual content" label, an attack which apparently only ended with the effective banning of the game. Apparently these people don't care about children, they just care about either political self-promotion or imposing their morality on others, and children are just a tool to achieve this.
While what you describe would be a really cool feature, it is also more easily said than done. I'm positive it could be added at some point, but it maybe isn't reasonable to expect it to be a 1.0 feature.
It isn't enough for security features to be there-- they have to be clear. The user interface is as much a part of the security as the permissions models-- a security feature which overwhelms the user with options is as bad as no security feature at all, as they'll just click "OK" without understanding what it was they did. And the firefox devs tend to err on the side of simplicity over power. Have you seen how many really important preferences are buried in that about:config forest because they couldn't bear clutter in the Preferences dialog?
Extensions are and should be applications unto themselves; that's the point. The fact they're written in javascript rather than machine code doesn't make them different than a.exe. If this isn't clear enough to the end user, then the first thing to do would be make that more clear.
Once that's past, though, it would make a lot of sense for a permissions model for extensions to be added as you suggest. If nothing else, it seems like it would be relatively easy to add an option for some or all extensions to be ratcheted down to the same permissions level as normal javascripts, rather than the extended permissions available to chrome javascripts, since many extensions don't actually take advantage of the extended permissions (as long as some kind of exception was added just large enough to allow extensions to create and edit their own preferences files). However: How should this be presented to the user?
You or I may have the ability to look at some random extension and go "well, knowing what this plugin does, it makes sense for this plugin to be able to modify DOMs and query websites, but not for it to be able to read files off the hard disk". You or I would then be able to set some checkboxes for each plugin specifying what they can and can't do in a granular fashion. But the average user doesn't understand such things, and so shouldn't be outright presented with these questions unless it's through a buried poweruser option like about:config is.
So how do we present this? Should the extensions be split into "trusted" (chrome permissions) and "untrusted" (page-level javascript permissions), and the user sees which is which when they look in the extensions dialog? Should the extension format be extended to include a requestpermisisons.rdf which results in the "would you like to install" dialog for the extension explaining to the user that this extension modifies webpages, this extension reads your hard drive, etc? Should there just be one big "allow extensions to access my hard drive" checkbox in the preferences?
I do not think the answers here are obvious. Some serious thought needs to go into this before the firefox peoples even make any attempt at implmenting it.
Anyway I suggest you file this to bugzilla as an enhancement request, or, um, exactly what is it one does with feature suggestions to mozilla?:)
It never ceases to fascinate me the way that "liberal" is a word whose definition is created and defined by absolutely everyone except whoever the liberals themselves are supposed to be. Ever notice that? Practically no one ever stands up and says "I am a liberal, because I believe this". We just get people going "you are a liberal, because you believe [blah]". The word is starting to be like "commie" or "nazi"; it isn't a political category, it's an insult.
Also fascinating that Bob Dole and George W. Bush are apparently "modern liberals". Who knew?
Why not choose some less ambiguous terms to describe Hilary Clinton, like "socially conservative"? Or why not just ditch the idiotic "liberal/conservative" dichonomy altogether, stop playing shell games with words that may or may not mean the same thing to different people, and discuss things in terms that actually describe what is going on? Here, I'll give you an example:
Hillary Clinton supports media censorship and is not worthy of anyone's support. If anyone looks at this in terms of "she's just lost my vote", then this means they weren't paying attention 10 years ago, because she's always been like this.
I assure you, every user in the world who is not insane considers "removes a vulnerability that potentially allows any website to read your hard drive" an "update".
I also assure you that if you want to engender trust among your users, removing as immediately as possible bits that would allow any website to read your hard drive is the way to do it.
If upgrades that incidentally break features are illegal, then every single software company in the world would be in jail by now. The legal reference you are vomiting all over this comment tree has nothing whatsoever to do with what WebMonkey did today, it concerns something different.
If you're so incredibly upset that a point release of a minor third-party extension for a minority web browser broke something minor in the process of fixing a truly huge and dangerous broken aspect of the previous point release, then the thing to do would be re-install the previous point release, not come make 30 posts whining about it on slashdot.
the update mechanism is different under linux
I have not used the firefox extention functionality under linux, but the documentation indicates you are flat out wrong here.
Slashdot Mirror
Also George W. Bush.
Call it a hunch, but it seems like Mr. Bush is starting to gain a certain level of political influence.
1905.
CHRISTIANS: We should teach religion in schools.
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY: No, we should not teach religion in schools.
COURTS: Yeah, pretty much.
(Pause.)
1955.
CHRISTIANS: We should teach "creationism" in schools.
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY: Um, that's the exact same thing as before. You're just calling it "creationism" instead of "religion". And you shouldn't teach religion in schools.
COURTS: Yeah, pretty much.
(Pause.)
2005.
CHRISTIANS: We should teach "intelligent design" in schools.
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY: Um, that's still the exact same thing as before. You're just calling it "intelligent design" instead of "creationism". And you still shouldn't teach religion in schools.
COURTS: Yeah, pretty much.
(Pause.)
2055.
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY: We should teach science in schools.
COURTS: Citizen, you have committed an Error. Please stand by until an armed guard can escort you to a Free Speech Zone.
CHRISTIANS: Man, living in a hyperbolic hypothetical example rocks!
Congratulations; it would appear that you have successfully learned to use the "copy and paste" function of your computer. It would appear you have also learned how to insult people.
If you can continue to apply these skills, you should do well at slashdot.org.
Fascinating!
In other news, Colin Powell performs an internal review of the army and discovers that the Mai Lai massacre was a "myth". Well, I'm glad we got that straightened out.
In the meantime, though, perhaps we should round out the set of fuzzy feel-good quotes from this blog with, oh, I don't know, the actual allegations that these fuzzy feel-good quotes are supposedly refuting. I'm not too familiar with the ins and outs of early-80s PC software myself, but this seems as good a source for that as any. It is some sort of document filed with the U.S. courts by the Consumer Federation of America in protest of the antitrust "settlement" which allowed Microsoft to avoid the remedy/punishment phase of their recent antitrust trial. Let's see:
You're seriously suggesting a system under which a government source would be perfectly anonymous not only to the newspaper's readers, not only to the newspaper, but to the reporters themselves?
I see. That sounds like a wonderful idea. For me, at least. Because if such a system existed, I would set myself up as an "anonymous high-ranking administration official" immediately. I mean, I'm a random computer programmer in Indiana. But the newspapers don't know that, do they? I'm anonymous. So give me a year and I'll have the New York Times printing that the Bush administration plans to use nuclear missles against Idaho.
(And if you have any doubt they'll trust my word, remember: they trusted Ahmed Chalabi.)
I am not buying one until Apple puts proper mouse buttons on its portables.
It seems like this "one button with HIDDEN BUTTONS OMG" technology could be relatively easily adapted to laptops.
Or, in other words, the members of this crowd, at least the ones that hang out on slashdot, in general tend to consider one-button mice inappropriate for low-end users. That is, these people would consider the multi-button mice something which is all well and good for power users (often including themselves) but which is not good for everyone-- and furthermore conclude that since a single mouse design can't please everyone, the low-end users should be the ones whom the computer's pack-in mice should please. Therefore, Apple's long-held decision to stay with one-button mice for the pack-in mouse would be the right one, since the low-end users are pleased by default and the power users can surely handle an operation like "go buy a mouse" on their own.
So from the above viewpoint, Apple's new programmable mouse thingy is the best of all possible worlds, since it entirely upsets the assumption above that one mouse can't please everybody-- because this one can. It can behave like a one-button mouse for low-end users or a two-button scrollmouse for high-end users with just a change in software configuration. I mean, I won't be buying one, but I can definitely see the attraction here.
So your way of putting things isn't exactly fair. But, hey, I guess it's easier to misrepresent people's views to make them look hypocritical than it is to try to understand what they're saying.I wouldn't know about this one, since I think the decision to move to x86 is a terrible one, I think Apple is handling the transition extremely poorly, and as a result I am seriously considering researching my alternatives the next time I buy a computer.
Interestingly, when I voiced this opinion on Slashdot, I was forcefully yelled at for being an "apple zealot". From the combination of this and your comment here, I can only conclude that if you're a mac user, you will be denounced for being an apple zealot if you agree with Apple's decision to move to x86 and denounced for being an apple zealot if you disagree with Apple's decision to move to x86. Hm.
At least that's better than "Rupert".
Because if America is superior to China, a still-stalinist-in-many-ways entity that probably qualifies as the most successful fascist nation in the world, then Americans don't need extralegal protections on their freedom of speech?
Wait, no. That's silly. There's a massive gray area between "Stalinist China" and "free", and anyway, America being superior to China now says nothing about the future. One would think that strengthening our guarantee to freedom of speech through technical as well as legal means could only be a good thing.
In the meantime, the government is far from the only entity which "political dissidents", as your quote puts it, might have to fear; any number of private or corporate entities, or persons, might be fully capable of in some way retaliating against some individual for exercising their speech, and in such circumstances the individual would generally have no legal recourse to first amendment rights.
Except, oh wait, it appears you feel that way already:
If you're looking for trampling of free speech, you needn't look to the government; you need only look no further than our own academic institutions. [thefire.org]
Oh, wait, never mind. And here I thought you were actually trying to discuss freenet, or the article. Nope, it looks like you're just trying to create a straw man by implying that the article means to speak of "dissidents" as only needing to fear the government, all so that you can tear it down by plugging a right-wing organization which exists to demonize academic institutions just for getting all huffy when people speak out against minorities. Which all may well be a suitible or potentially interesting topic for discussion, but seems almost entirely offtopic for this article.
But in answer to your question, it seems examples abound where exercising free speech in public results in negative and undesirable attention from the government, thus making it fair to say that yes, freenet might be in some circumstances a useful tool for avoiding such things. I provide that link simply because it was the most recent example in a story on, well, slashdot.
Early on in the case, this would have been a huge big revelation; a sort of a... "Wait, you mean SCO is basing their entire future around denouncing UNIX license fees not being paid by people who aren't even using UNIX... yet SCO allegedly isn't paying the license fees for their real UNIX?"
...but now now we've gotten to the point where literally no amount of lying, theft or abuse on the part of SCO can surprise us, this little tidbit will slide right past the media as nothing but a footnote and a handful of slashdot comments.
And lets not forget, once China gets their human rights issues resolved, there's tons of profit to be made.
Unfortunately "China gets their human rights issues resolved" is much less likely to mean "China stops human rights abuses" than it is to mean "America convinces its citizens to stop caring about China's human rights abuses".
And, frankly, it seems that China's human rights issues are probably already almost "resolved" in this sense at this point.
I think something is very, very wrong when we base a company's perceived future viability not on "does it have money?" or "is it making money?", but apparently solely on "does it have a big corporate sugar daddy to support it regardless of its fortunes?"
Isn't HD-DVD's one big touted advantage supposed to be, and correct me if I'm recalling wrong here, easy backwards compatability?
As far as I'm aware, the advantage is and always has been easy backward compatibility for the content industries. From the consumer perspective, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be equally backward compatible with DVD, and both will achieve this backward compatibility in the same way-- by adding a third laser to the two which DVD drives already possess (one laser for CD frequencies, one laser for DVD frequencies, one laser for the "blue" HD disc frequencies).
In fact from the consumer perspective if anything Blu-Ray is more backward compatible than HD-DVD-- because it is possible to manufacture Blu-Ray discs which can be placed in a standard DVD or CD player, and which appear as DVDs to a DVD player and Blu-Rays to a Blu-Ray player. (However, it is unclear if any such Blu-Ray discs will ever be manufactured, and anyway it may not be too late for HD-DVD to adopt this same feature.)
The tauted "backward compatibility" of HD-DVD is, as noted above, from the perspective of a content producer. That is to say, you can manufacture HD-DVDs in the same machines you manufacture DVDs in, with some slight upgrades. If you wish to manufacture Blu-Ray discs, you must buy a new machine. Of course, we are told, if it is cheaper to manufacture HD-DVDs than Blu-Ray discs because you don't have to buy new machines, then the discs will be cheaper for the consumer as well. Hooray for trickle-down economics!
And of course from the perspective of a content producer, forcing your cattle, I mean consumers, to buy new "secure" equipment-- as HD-DVD does and Blu-Ray probably will-- is a big plus.
The end result is that HDMI is a preferable solution going forward. Most likely it is going to win out; we're just going to have to accept the associated DRM.
My understanding is that HDCP (the "associated DRM" in HDMI) is not part of HDMI, but rather a separate layer which may be placed on top of either HDMI or DVI.
Am I wrong?
Blu-Ray is going into American homes anyway, because it's part of the PS3 and it's probably too late for Sony to back out of that now even if they want to. Even if retailers don't want it, even if Blu-Ray fails miserably as a video format, or even if both HDDVD and Blu-Ray fail miserably as video formats and stores refuse to stock them, there are still going to be the Blu-Ray players and discs out there-- because that's what PS3 games are stored on, and this is going to happen with or without the video features ever being used. And this is going to start early next year, probably long before HDDVD players or discs become available.
Moreover, Blu-Ray isn't going to hurt the PS3-- since if Blu-Ray movies turn out to never happen, then from a consumer perspective all three video game consoles have the exact same video playback features (they all three play DVDs, though the Revolution requires an adapter and the PS3 has the additional optional bluray ability).
So, what effect does the above have?
It would appear you either are misinformed or trying to mislead us.
Do you see the little foot, the one displayed next to the headline?
It means something.
I'm actually finding this whole thing amusing because I last week was looking around on google maps trying to find specific things, and one of the things I decided to specifically look for was the WTC site. Sure enough, it's just a flat construction site. So for me this article is a "hey, I was just looking at that" sort of thing. What I really found interesting at the time though was once I found the WTC site I started zooming out... the little beige hole in the middle of Manhattan where the WTC used to be is still clearly visible all the way out until you've zoomed out past the entire state of New Jersey...
When did google add the satellite images to google maps? Is that new too?
:)
This totally makes up for the lack of a Google Earth mac version
Had the ESRB known about that content, the game would have been rated differently.
Clearly not, or God of War would be AO. It is not. It is M.
When the ESRB claims that had they known about the "hot coffee" content they'd have given the game an AO, they are lying to save face.
The ESRB has been demonstrated a tool for censorship from outside, as demonstrated by the fact that a game has just been effectively banned from sale in the U.S., by way of it being moved from M to AO, based on nothing but a targeted public smear campaign. The content even in the modded "AO" version of GTA:SA is significantly tamer than the sexual content that which is already present in a very large number of M games.
This has been demonstrated by their extended attack on a game that was already "mature, 17 or older only, not to be sold to minors" with a "strong sexual content" label, an attack which apparently only ended with the effective banning of the game. Apparently these people don't care about children, they just care about either political self-promotion or imposing their morality on others, and children are just a tool to achieve this.
Now that is a feat: getting your enemy to obtain your goal for you.
Nah, it isn't really that impressive. After all, that's the entire point of terrorism in the first place.
Modern Socially Neo Conservative Old School Liberal
I think you just invented a subgenre of punk music.
While what you describe would be a really cool feature, it is also more easily said than done. I'm positive it could be added at some point, but it maybe isn't reasonable to expect it to be a 1.0 feature.
.exe. If this isn't clear enough to the end user, then the first thing to do would be make that more clear.
:)
It isn't enough for security features to be there-- they have to be clear. The user interface is as much a part of the security as the permissions models-- a security feature which overwhelms the user with options is as bad as no security feature at all, as they'll just click "OK" without understanding what it was they did. And the firefox devs tend to err on the side of simplicity over power. Have you seen how many really important preferences are buried in that about:config forest because they couldn't bear clutter in the Preferences dialog?
Extensions are and should be applications unto themselves; that's the point. The fact they're written in javascript rather than machine code doesn't make them different than a
Once that's past, though, it would make a lot of sense for a permissions model for extensions to be added as you suggest. If nothing else, it seems like it would be relatively easy to add an option for some or all extensions to be ratcheted down to the same permissions level as normal javascripts, rather than the extended permissions available to chrome javascripts, since many extensions don't actually take advantage of the extended permissions (as long as some kind of exception was added just large enough to allow extensions to create and edit their own preferences files). However: How should this be presented to the user?
You or I may have the ability to look at some random extension and go "well, knowing what this plugin does, it makes sense for this plugin to be able to modify DOMs and query websites, but not for it to be able to read files off the hard disk". You or I would then be able to set some checkboxes for each plugin specifying what they can and can't do in a granular fashion. But the average user doesn't understand such things, and so shouldn't be outright presented with these questions unless it's through a buried poweruser option like about:config is.
So how do we present this? Should the extensions be split into "trusted" (chrome permissions) and "untrusted" (page-level javascript permissions), and the user sees which is which when they look in the extensions dialog? Should the extension format be extended to include a requestpermisisons.rdf which results in the "would you like to install" dialog for the extension explaining to the user that this extension modifies webpages, this extension reads your hard drive, etc? Should there just be one big "allow extensions to access my hard drive" checkbox in the preferences?
I do not think the answers here are obvious. Some serious thought needs to go into this before the firefox peoples even make any attempt at implmenting it.
Anyway I suggest you file this to bugzilla as an enhancement request, or, um, exactly what is it one does with feature suggestions to mozilla?
It never ceases to fascinate me the way that "liberal" is a word whose definition is created and defined by absolutely everyone except whoever the liberals themselves are supposed to be. Ever notice that? Practically no one ever stands up and says "I am a liberal, because I believe this". We just get people going "you are a liberal, because you believe [blah]". The word is starting to be like "commie" or "nazi"; it isn't a political category, it's an insult.
Also fascinating that Bob Dole and George W. Bush are apparently "modern liberals". Who knew?
Why not choose some less ambiguous terms to describe Hilary Clinton, like "socially conservative"? Or why not just ditch the idiotic "liberal/conservative" dichonomy altogether, stop playing shell games with words that may or may not mean the same thing to different people, and discuss things in terms that actually describe what is going on? Here, I'll give you an example:
Hillary Clinton supports media censorship and is not worthy of anyone's support. If anyone looks at this in terms of "she's just lost my vote", then this means they weren't paying attention 10 years ago, because she's always been like this.
Huh?
Calling it an update, when in actual fact its not
I assure you, every user in the world who is not insane considers "removes a vulnerability that potentially allows any website to read your hard drive" an "update".
I also assure you that if you want to engender trust among your users, removing as immediately as possible bits that would allow any website to read your hard drive is the way to do it.
If upgrades that incidentally break features are illegal, then every single software company in the world would be in jail by now. The legal reference you are vomiting all over this comment tree has nothing whatsoever to do with what WebMonkey did today, it concerns something different.
If you're so incredibly upset that a point release of a minor third-party extension for a minority web browser broke something minor in the process of fixing a truly huge and dangerous broken aspect of the previous point release, then the thing to do would be re-install the previous point release, not come make 30 posts whining about it on slashdot.
the update mechanism is different under linux
I have not used the firefox extention functionality under linux, but the documentation indicates you are flat out wrong here.
In any case, if you wish to turn off the automatic update notify feature for extensions, instructions on how to do so can be found here.