It's not like they don't know who the cheaters are. They just haven't gotten it together to squeeze the unpaid tolls and fines out of them. And I'd bet that it would cost them a lot more than $30 million a year to go back to human-toll-takers-only.
Roadside OCR has gotten good enough so they can simply log all the cars that pass a point and send them bills. Of course, there will be a small number of people who live far away and can't be billed, but the free ride they get is more than compensated by not having to build and staff toll booths.
One use of this technology is to levy congestion tolls: incentive for people to switch to public transit in areas where traffic is out of control. This isn't going to be popular, but it might help make a lot of densely populated urban areas a lot more livable.
You can always simply drive through a checkpoint without an ez-pass, and most likely nothing will happen [nbc4.com] for a long time.
Maybe in Maryland. In California, the camera will note your plate, and a computer will issue a ticket. Unless you have a FasTrak device and just forgot it, in which case they'll charge your account, though I think you can get hit with an extra fee if you do this too often.
Right you are. Should have looked at the site before I pontificated.
They also use the Move Player, against which I have a personal grudge. Ever since abc.com switched to it, I can no longer watch shows full screen. Why buggy and irritating media players with no obvious added value continue to proliferate is the great mystery of our time.
It seems to me that everybody who's complaining about the anti-Linux filter is making the same mistake the web designer made.
A good web designer who wants to support multiple browser-OS combinations (I don't want to use that phrase over and over, so I'm just going to say "browser") doesn't bother with the agent string. Working that way means you have to make all kinds of assumptions about what features the browser does and does not support. Get one of those assumptions wrong, and your claim to support that browser is bogus. Since web designers typically don't have time to test every web page on every browser they want to support, they don't find out these mistakes until users complain about them.
(When I encounter a web site that makes this mistake, I spoof a browser it does support. Easy to do in Firefox, even if you don't have the User Agent String add-on. Half the time, the web site works fine. Did anybody think to try that with the convention web site?)
The right way to do it is, first, avoid browser-specific idioms. If you can't eliminate them completely, you don't code your application to work one way on one browser and another way on another. Instead you probe for the features the browser supports, and respond accordingly.
But once you've made the fundamental mistake of coding-to-the-browser, it makes perfect sense to say, "we support X, Y, and Z, and nothing else". Once you start thinking in terms of "system requirements" instead of browser features, it an obvious step to phrase your system requirements so that you maximize your user base and minimize your development and support costs. So the the web designers are telling each other, "We have to place some kind of limit on what we support, and the two OSs that account for 95% of all users is a good place to draw it." In that context, bitching about lack of Linux support sounds like just another fringe political agenda. And politicians are pretty darn good at filtering those out!
Most social sites are shallow because most people are shallow.
I'm not expert on social sites (not very social) but I've been on specialized sites where the user base is reasonably intelligent. LinkedIn, for example.
No, that's Australian dollars. A mere 8700 US. Anyway, I think the third machine is meant to be pure fantasy, as in "What you would buy if you totally didn't give a shit about money?" So they use DDR3 memory, though I doubt that it would provide much of a performance gain on a gaming system. And they put in a Blu-Ray burner; simply because it's the most expensive optical drive you can buy.
On the other hand, a good chunk of the cost is that 4-GPU video adapter. I'm not enough of a gamer to know whether there are actually any games that would benefit from that much processing power. But if there is, and you really enjoy gaming, the Moore's Law argument doesn't apply. Any new computer will lose most of its value in 18 months. So your investment is going to be wiped out no matter how much you spend.
If that bothers you, you should never buy new systems at all. There's some serious used hardware out there unbelievably cheap. I recently bought my sister an off-lease Optiplex. This beast was not only old, it was not considered a high-performance system when it was made. Yet it has a fairly powerful GPU and is a respectable graphics workstation. Probably not suitable for a FPS, but I'll bet I could look at any of the rigs in TFA, and come up with recycled hardware that would be half as powerful for 1/10 the cost. But of course serious gamers are will to spend the extra 90% to get that extra 50% performance — even though whatever they buy will lose most of its value very quickly.
You're right, the FSF ideas have done much to change the software engineering landscape for the better. But not always in the ways they intended. For example, they can take credit for creating the whole Open Source software movement. But they never will, because OS people don't care about the dragons that FSF wants to slay. Where FSF's Free Software is about changing the IP landscape, OS is just about better models of collaboration. FSF doesn't care about OS's achievements, even though they can claim partial responsibility for them.
One reason there's such a disconnect between the FSF's goals and its actual achievements: they can't seem to get stuff finished. GNU has been a work-in-progress for 25 years! (By way of comparison, Duke Nukem Forever is only a decade behind schedule.) Its components ended up being useful, but only because some Finnish grad student managed to do in a few weeks what GNU's programmers can't seem to do at all: create an OS kernel.
Now they're sponsoring a Linux distro that nobody will use, just so they can claim its "truely free". Once again, this project will not have any effects that they intend it to. Assuming it has any at all, which I very much doubt.
Two words: streaming media. For many of us, the Internet is our substitute for cable TV. Now, for me, my 1Mbps is perfectly adequate for the network TV, Hulu, and Netflix streams I watch. But if you want high-definition content, you need more bandwidth.
Also, I'm guessing you don't share your connection. Neither do I, but I used to, and there were issues with my hogging the bandwidth. (Note: wget's default options are not suitable for big downloads on shared DSL connections.) If you have, say, 4 people surfing YouTube, downloading torrents, watching TV reruns, and snagging the odd uberfile from work, you need a lot more bandwidth. Maybe not as much as you have, but enough to strain any service that's available where I live.
The Cemetery and Funeral businesses call these Pre-need sales and use them to maintain sales numbers.
You make it sound dishonest. I assume that when you get a "pre-need" plot you have to actually pay for it? Then it's sold. When you buy a new residence, the sale occurs when you pay your money, not when you move in!
What's your point? That flamebait attracts readers? Sure it does. It also drives them away. Maybe you end up with more readers total — but are they the ones you want
Posting stupid stories might get Slashdot more eyeballs, but that doesn't prove that the editors know they're stupid. Usually, it's pretty obvious that they don't.
But what's the point? In the bug you pointed to, you eliminated a "non-free" driver (which could mean that it's closed-source, or just that the FSF doesn't approve of its license) and also other drivers that are free but happened to be in the same package. Now anybody who needs the drivers you removed can't run this distro.
I don't see what purpose this serves except to make SWTBF zealots feel good about themselves.
Perhaps you think that you're bringing extra pressure on manufacturers to release "free" drivers. But that doesn't work unless a lot of consumers refuse to buy hardware with "non-free" drivers. And 90% of them are Windows users, who just don't care. The rest of us don't have that much control over what hardware we have access to, so even if we care (and we mostly don't) we're going to choose the distro that's mostly likely to Just Work, not the distro that's Politically Correct. A tiny minority of a tiny minority of the consuming public isn't going to change any business models.
As long as we have the attention of somebody actually involved with creating the distro, perhaps you could respond to the point I raised at the top of the thread.
That's a good point, one I hadn't thought about. But if licensing issues are a problem for pre-installed Linux, how have existing manufacturers coped? Note that this distro is just Ubuntu with all the "restricted" (closed-source, but freely redistributable) stuff removed. I see nothing in Ubuntu's licensing that would prevent somebody from selling a system with Ubuntu pre-installed.
In any case, GNewSense's mission statement has nothing to say about the legal hassles of people selling Linux-based PCs. It's all about the way they think software should and should not be licensed.
Remember, this is the Free Software Foundation, which doesn't do anything non-ideological. To them "non-free" software is evil, and practical considerations be damned. Everything they do is about that.
There are already hundreds (thousands?) of Linux distros. But apparently all of them have licensing terms that are Evil, so we need one another one.
Or do we? Each existing distro has some kind of user community, and presumably those users have some reason for preferring that particular distro. Are they going to abandon their current distro and and switch to this one, just because it meets the FSF's arcane political requirements? And if your distro doesn't have a user community, why bother creating it?
Maybe you kid, but it is interesting that APT seems to be able to handle more complex dependency graphs than RPM. What I've never understood is why it needs to. What more is there to package dependency resolution than a simple recursive procedure? In pseudocode:
resolve(x)
addtolist(x)
dependsOn = dependsList(x)
for each y in dependsOn
resolve(y) end resolve
The distinction between math and logic is pretty vague. Logic started out as the branch of philosophy that studied correct reasoning, but nowadays its students are mostly scientists and engineers interested in formal reasoning. That aligns it a lot more closely with math than with philosophy.
At the college I went to, logic was taught by a guy who had a degree in philosophy, but had lost interest in the entire subject, except for formal logic. Except for the mandatory turn at freshman intro to philosophy (which some people complained he taught half-heartedly) logic was all he taught, and that from a strictly formal perspective — no study of fallacious reasoning, no mention of syllogisms. Most of his students (all of them in his upper division and graduate classes) were math majors. In fact, most of his classes counted as "physical science" rather than "humanities" for satisfying your graduation requirements — even though they were offered by the Humanities Division! His career kind of parallels that of the discipline he taught.
Did you actually read TPP or the Wikipedia article you linked to? If so you read one or both very carelessly. The fallacy you describe would apply if he'd said:
If there were a government conspiracy, then NIST (being part of the conspiricy) would deny it. NIST denies that there was a government conspiracy. Therefore There is a government conspiracy.
Except TPP didn't say anything like that. It was more like:
I don't know if there was a conspiracy or not. If there were a government conspiracy, then NIST (being part of the conspiricy) would deny it. Therefore NISTs denial is not trustworthy.
There are problems with that argument too. But if you're going to attack it, try arguing in plain English. Then you won't trip over technical concepts you don't understand.
I won't call you crazy. People who don't feel secure (and if you're a middle-to-upper-class person in Mexico, you have much reason to feel insecure!) are easily taken in by gimmicks like this.
Even if the GPS thing were built into the chip, what good would it do? The first thing kidnappers would do would be to dig it out.
Firefox has been pushing version 3.0 very aggressively, and firmly believes that it is a solid product.
And indeed it is — more solid, in fact, than FF2, with its nasty memory leaks and race conditions. But I thought "Firefox" was a software, not a person.
You're completely right, though you do understate the hassle of getting a proper certificate in place.
Right now, I'm working on a new version of an internal web site. One reason I have to upgrade the web site is to support LDAP-over-SSL authentication. So I need a temporary certificate for the prototype, then a second one for the permanent installation. The procedure I have has no less than 13 steps, some of them a little tricky.
Which is not to make excuses. You have to have current certificates, or the whole system falls apart, and the phishers have a field day. So far, web masters have gotten away with being sloppy, because an invalid certificate just generated an incomprehensible dialog box of the kind that most users habitually ignore.
I have many issues with Firefox, but I think the way FF3 handles web site certificates is extremely well done. It clearly explains what's going wrong and what your options are. If it's scary and intimidating, all the better.
"Massive" is Gibbon's Decline and Fall in seven volumes. 23,000 words is about 2-3 times as long as a typical article in the kind of magazine that doesn't have recipes or pictures of Paris Hilton. That a lot of words, but it isn't enough to fill even a short book (about 75,000 words). Hardly "massive".
I don't agree. Slashdot has never pretended to be objective. But there's a difference between the slanted newsgathering the editors have always done and the outright rants that they've been doing lately.
One difference is the blogosphere. Slashdot stories used to be mostly summaries of (and links to) stories on serious news site. Now there are thousands of angry, self-righteous blogs out there, and they all have have "Submit to Slashdot" buttons. The editors often pass these submissions on with little or no editing (in particular, they rarely double check the blogger's assertions) and end up posting a lot of very subjective opinions as if they're established fact.
Plus, many editors seem to have been infected by the Howard Beale attitude of the blogosphere, and feel compelled to add their own ill-informed little rants.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not like they don't know who the cheaters are. They just haven't gotten it together to squeeze the unpaid tolls and fines out of them. And I'd bet that it would cost them a lot more than $30 million a year to go back to human-toll-takers-only.
Roadside OCR has gotten good enough so they can simply log all the cars that pass a point and send them bills. Of course, there will be a small number of people who live far away and can't be billed, but the free ride they get is more than compensated by not having to build and staff toll booths.
One use of this technology is to levy congestion tolls: incentive for people to switch to public transit in areas where traffic is out of control. This isn't going to be popular, but it might help make a lot of densely populated urban areas a lot more livable.
You can always simply drive through a checkpoint without an ez-pass, and most likely nothing will happen [nbc4.com] for a long time.
Maybe in Maryland. In California, the camera will note your plate, and a computer will issue a ticket. Unless you have a FasTrak device and just forgot it, in which case they'll charge your account, though I think you can get hit with an extra fee if you do this too often.
Right you are. Should have looked at the site before I pontificated.
They also use the Move Player, against which I have a personal grudge. Ever since abc.com switched to it, I can no longer watch shows full screen. Why buggy and irritating media players with no obvious added value continue to proliferate is the great mystery of our time.
It seems to me that everybody who's complaining about the anti-Linux filter is making the same mistake the web designer made.
A good web designer who wants to support multiple browser-OS combinations (I don't want to use that phrase over and over, so I'm just going to say "browser") doesn't bother with the agent string. Working that way means you have to make all kinds of assumptions about what features the browser does and does not support. Get one of those assumptions wrong, and your claim to support that browser is bogus. Since web designers typically don't have time to test every web page on every browser they want to support, they don't find out these mistakes until users complain about them.
(When I encounter a web site that makes this mistake, I spoof a browser it does support. Easy to do in Firefox, even if you don't have the User Agent String add-on. Half the time, the web site works fine. Did anybody think to try that with the convention web site?)
The right way to do it is, first, avoid browser-specific idioms. If you can't eliminate them completely, you don't code your application to work one way on one browser and another way on another. Instead you probe for the features the browser supports, and respond accordingly.
But once you've made the fundamental mistake of coding-to-the-browser, it makes perfect sense to say, "we support X, Y, and Z, and nothing else". Once you start thinking in terms of "system requirements" instead of browser features, it an obvious step to phrase your system requirements so that you maximize your user base and minimize your development and support costs. So the the web designers are telling each other, "We have to place some kind of limit on what we support, and the two OSs that account for 95% of all users is a good place to draw it." In that context, bitching about lack of Linux support sounds like just another fringe political agenda. And politicians are pretty darn good at filtering those out!
Most social sites are shallow because most people are shallow.
I'm not expert on social sites (not very social) but I've been on specialized sites where the user base is reasonably intelligent. LinkedIn, for example.
No, that's Australian dollars. A mere 8700 US. Anyway, I think the third machine is meant to be pure fantasy, as in "What you would buy if you totally didn't give a shit about money?" So they use DDR3 memory, though I doubt that it would provide much of a performance gain on a gaming system. And they put in a Blu-Ray burner; simply because it's the most expensive optical drive you can buy.
On the other hand, a good chunk of the cost is that 4-GPU video adapter. I'm not enough of a gamer to know whether there are actually any games that would benefit from that much processing power. But if there is, and you really enjoy gaming, the Moore's Law argument doesn't apply. Any new computer will lose most of its value in 18 months. So your investment is going to be wiped out no matter how much you spend.
If that bothers you, you should never buy new systems at all. There's some serious used hardware out there unbelievably cheap. I recently bought my sister an off-lease Optiplex. This beast was not only old, it was not considered a high-performance system when it was made. Yet it has a fairly powerful GPU and is a respectable graphics workstation. Probably not suitable for a FPS, but I'll bet I could look at any of the rigs in TFA, and come up with recycled hardware that would be half as powerful for 1/10 the cost. But of course serious gamers are will to spend the extra 90% to get that extra 50% performance — even though whatever they buy will lose most of its value very quickly.
You do know the difference between a discussion site and a social networking site, right?
You're right, the FSF ideas have done much to change the software engineering landscape for the better. But not always in the ways they intended. For example, they can take credit for creating the whole Open Source software movement. But they never will, because OS people don't care about the dragons that FSF wants to slay. Where FSF's Free Software is about changing the IP landscape, OS is just about better models of collaboration. FSF doesn't care about OS's achievements, even though they can claim partial responsibility for them.
One reason there's such a disconnect between the FSF's goals and its actual achievements: they can't seem to get stuff finished. GNU has been a work-in-progress for 25 years! (By way of comparison, Duke Nukem Forever is only a decade behind schedule.) Its components ended up being useful, but only because some Finnish grad student managed to do in a few weeks what GNU's programmers can't seem to do at all: create an OS kernel.
Now they're sponsoring a Linux distro that nobody will use, just so they can claim its "truely free". Once again, this project will not have any effects that they intend it to. Assuming it has any at all, which I very much doubt.
Two words: streaming media. For many of us, the Internet is our substitute for cable TV. Now, for me, my 1Mbps is perfectly adequate for the network TV, Hulu, and Netflix streams I watch. But if you want high-definition content, you need more bandwidth.
Also, I'm guessing you don't share your connection. Neither do I, but I used to, and there were issues with my hogging the bandwidth. (Note: wget's default options are not suitable for big downloads on shared DSL connections.) If you have, say, 4 people surfing YouTube, downloading torrents, watching TV reruns, and snagging the odd uberfile from work, you need a lot more bandwidth. Maybe not as much as you have, but enough to strain any service that's available where I live.
The Cemetery and Funeral businesses call these Pre-need sales and use them to maintain sales numbers.
You make it sound dishonest. I assume that when you get a "pre-need" plot you have to actually pay for it? Then it's sold. When you buy a new residence, the sale occurs when you pay your money, not when you move in!
What's your point? That flamebait attracts readers? Sure it does. It also drives them away. Maybe you end up with more readers total — but are they the ones you want
Posting stupid stories might get Slashdot more eyeballs, but that doesn't prove that the editors know they're stupid. Usually, it's pretty obvious that they don't.
But what's the point? In the bug you pointed to, you eliminated a "non-free" driver (which could mean that it's closed-source, or just that the FSF doesn't approve of its license) and also other drivers that are free but happened to be in the same package. Now anybody who needs the drivers you removed can't run this distro.
I don't see what purpose this serves except to make SWTBF zealots feel good about themselves.
Perhaps you think that you're bringing extra pressure on manufacturers to release "free" drivers. But that doesn't work unless a lot of consumers refuse to buy hardware with "non-free" drivers. And 90% of them are Windows users, who just don't care. The rest of us don't have that much control over what hardware we have access to, so even if we care (and we mostly don't) we're going to choose the distro that's mostly likely to Just Work, not the distro that's Politically Correct. A tiny minority of a tiny minority of the consuming public isn't going to change any business models.
OK, I stand corrected.
As long as we have the attention of somebody actually involved with creating the distro, perhaps you could respond to the point I raised at the top of the thread.
That's a good point, one I hadn't thought about. But if licensing issues are a problem for pre-installed Linux, how have existing manufacturers coped? Note that this distro is just Ubuntu with all the "restricted" (closed-source, but freely redistributable) stuff removed. I see nothing in Ubuntu's licensing that would prevent somebody from selling a system with Ubuntu pre-installed.
In any case, GNewSense's mission statement has nothing to say about the legal hassles of people selling Linux-based PCs. It's all about the way they think software should and should not be licensed.
Remember, this is the Free Software Foundation, which doesn't do anything non-ideological. To them "non-free" software is evil, and practical considerations be damned. Everything they do is about that.
There are already hundreds (thousands?) of Linux distros. But apparently all of them have licensing terms that are Evil, so we need one another one.
Or do we? Each existing distro has some kind of user community, and presumably those users have some reason for preferring that particular distro. Are they going to abandon their current distro and and switch to this one, just because it meets the FSF's arcane political requirements? And if your distro doesn't have a user community, why bother creating it?
Maybe you kid, but it is interesting that APT seems to be able to handle more complex dependency graphs than RPM. What I've never understood is why it needs to. What more is there to package dependency resolution than a simple recursive procedure? In pseudocode:
The distinction between math and logic is pretty vague. Logic started out as the branch of philosophy that studied correct reasoning, but nowadays its students are mostly scientists and engineers interested in formal reasoning. That aligns it a lot more closely with math than with philosophy.
At the college I went to, logic was taught by a guy who had a degree in philosophy, but had lost interest in the entire subject, except for formal logic. Except for the mandatory turn at freshman intro to philosophy (which some people complained he taught half-heartedly) logic was all he taught, and that from a strictly formal perspective — no study of fallacious reasoning, no mention of syllogisms. Most of his students (all of them in his upper division and graduate classes) were math majors. In fact, most of his classes counted as "physical science" rather than "humanities" for satisfying your graduation requirements — even though they were offered by the Humanities Division! His career kind of parallels that of the discipline he taught.
Did you actually read TPP or the Wikipedia article you linked to? If so you read one or both very carelessly. The fallacy you describe would apply if he'd said:
If there were a government conspiracy, then NIST (being part of the conspiricy) would deny it.
NIST denies that there was a government conspiracy.
Therefore There is a government conspiracy.
Except TPP didn't say anything like that. It was more like:
I don't know if there was a conspiracy or not.
If there were a government conspiracy, then NIST (being part of the conspiricy) would deny it.
Therefore NISTs denial is not trustworthy.
There are problems with that argument too. But if you're going to attack it, try arguing in plain English. Then you won't trip over technical concepts you don't understand.
I won't call you crazy. People who don't feel secure (and if you're a middle-to-upper-class person in Mexico, you have much reason to feel insecure!) are easily taken in by gimmicks like this.
Even if the GPS thing were built into the chip, what good would it do? The first thing kidnappers would do would be to dig it out.
Firefox has been pushing version 3.0 very aggressively, and firmly believes that it is a solid product.
And indeed it is — more solid, in fact, than FF2, with its nasty memory leaks and race conditions. But I thought "Firefox" was a software, not a person.
You're completely right, though you do understate the hassle of getting a proper certificate in place.
Right now, I'm working on a new version of an internal web site. One reason I have to upgrade the web site is to support LDAP-over-SSL authentication. So I need a temporary certificate for the prototype, then a second one for the permanent installation. The procedure I have has no less than 13 steps, some of them a little tricky.
Which is not to make excuses. You have to have current certificates, or the whole system falls apart, and the phishers have a field day. So far, web masters have gotten away with being sloppy, because an invalid certificate just generated an incomprehensible dialog box of the kind that most users habitually ignore.
I have many issues with Firefox, but I think the way FF3 handles web site certificates is extremely well done. It clearly explains what's going wrong and what your options are. If it's scary and intimidating, all the better.
Mainframes have their advantages
Such as? Aside from the ability to run legacy code.
"Massive" is Gibbon's Decline and Fall in seven volumes. 23,000 words is about 2-3 times as long as a typical article in the kind of magazine that doesn't have recipes or pictures of Paris Hilton. That a lot of words, but it isn't enough to fill even a short book (about 75,000 words). Hardly "massive".
I don't agree. Slashdot has never pretended to be objective. But there's a difference between the slanted newsgathering the editors have always done and the outright rants that they've been doing lately.
One difference is the blogosphere. Slashdot stories used to be mostly summaries of (and links to) stories on serious news site. Now there are thousands of angry, self-righteous blogs out there, and they all have have "Submit to Slashdot" buttons. The editors often pass these submissions on with little or no editing (in particular, they rarely double check the blogger's assertions) and end up posting a lot of very subjective opinions as if they're established fact.
Plus, many editors seem to have been infected by the Howard Beale attitude of the blogosphere, and feel compelled to add their own ill-informed little rants.