What if all I would do would be to say "Ow, you bastard, why did you do that?"
Some of us don't have the automatic reaction to punch back. And if you keep punching, we can take it indefinitely.
And don't say it's just because we're pansies and it will eventually become necessary for us to punch back. Martin Luther King didn't win the fight against segregation by deciding "now is the time to punch back", but by deciding, "never is the time to punch back."
72% of Americans think it would be helpful.
72% of Americans are not Computer Science majors. (or whatever else would be applicable)
Kind of like that journalist whose knee-jerk reaction to email viruses(/worms) was to insist we all implement and use digital signatures. Evidently it never occured that we get the pathogens from our family and friends (they're sent to everybody in your address book) and thus the malicious packages would still be properly signed.
In fact, one of the first thoughts that entered my head last Tuesday morning was the possibility this whole thing might have been engineered by some element within our own government in order to increase the scope of its power in the backlash.
Granted now I'm leaning toward Islamic fundamentalists as most of us have been, and as I have been since then but still the possibility isn't ruled out.
The mere fact that I'm considered unpatriotic and traitorous for not supporting every damn thing our government comes up with this past week just confirms my suspicion that people are trying to take advantage of the public's succeptibility to suggestion at times like this, at the very least.
The response that "we need more restrictions and tougher laws/more athority to combat these menaces" is itself a knee-jerk reaction.
I don't know which authorities are saying that these people used email to communicate, and did it encryptedly, but I've never seen any terrorist activities linked to the internet substantively (by which I mean they actually siezed somebody's pc and used the key on their hard drive to decrypt messages plotting terrorist attacks, rather than simply "we suspect" and "authorities think")
The attack itself was painfully low-tech. Why? Because all our countermeasures are aimed at preventing technological threats. So a low-tech threat slips past them. Thus there is reason to believe their coordination was low-tech as well: With all the emails, pagers, and telephones in the world you still can't beat good old face to face contact when you don't want to be snooped on. Once again, our countermeasurse are directed at a high-tech threat, and a low-tech approach can bypass them completely. The depressing thing about the new airline regulations prohibiting box cutters and all knives is that I could still get weapons onto a plane if I needed to. (no I'm not saying how, better I'm the only one who knows than some crazy kook who would actually do it finds out how)
Assuming the key players met face to face to plan this out (the smart thing to do since any other way would be subject to electronic monitoring) they could have easily established code words/phrases, like for instance "I bought a new pair of shoes" would mean that tomorrow morning the attack was to be carried out as discussed, "I need to go do laundry today" would mean to abort the plans. We would now need to suspect everybody who emails/phones each other discussing the mundane details of their personal lives! You could hide things in plain sight and crypto-busting power wouldn't mean shit.
Even if the perpetrators of this attack weren't doing things the good old-fashioned way, if we gave our government sweeping crypto-cracking powers all it would take would be one terrorist getting caught, and all the rest would look to history and switch to doing things the way that's worked for centuries. Then all the government would be getting out of our encrypted email would be the personal information of those of us who use crypto because we don't want stalkers who know our daily schedule or such. The reverse of "If you've done nothing wrong, you'll have nothing to hide." will be what's true, since the people who are doing wrong things will be hiding it all in plain sight.
Authorities were unable to stop this incident because the terrorists had thought of something that had never been tried before. Previously pilots and other airline employees were instructed to comply with all demands of hijackers, under the assumption that the worst risk was the safety of those on the plane and that cooperation would lead to safety. This was a perfectly reasonable assumption to draw until last Tuesday because that was how all prior hijackings had worked. Now instructions are different. Nobody anticipated that an airplane would be used as a massive bomb. The attack got past us simply because we did not anticipate an attack of this type.
No matter how hard we crack down, there will always be people thinking of news ways to kill us because we can only crack down with the anticipation of certain types of attacks. As long as a way of attacking exists which we have not yet thought of, we will be vulnerable and somebody out there will think of it and use it on us. (this theory is also applied in computer security, as you hear peole say "there's no such thing as secure, only more secure and less secure") All we can really do is make ourselves less of a target, and remove the sickeningly efficient and obvious ways to achieve mass death, like nukes.
Just to clarify, the president in question was dead by the end of that war and his successor, Harry Truman, authorized the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
All these replies about beer reminded me of a couple software packages I've downloaded that were "beer ware":
basically if you like the program and use it a lot you are encouraged to send the developer a case of beer.
Sounds like a good license to me!
This sounds a lot like if Microsoft were to go after Corel (or anybody else) for using the name Office (Wordperfect Office). Why haven't they already? Because as any IP expert will tell you, the trademark is Microsoft Office, not just Office. It's meaningless without the MS in front of it.
Ditto Adobe Illustrator and the word "illustrator".
This is not the same as PhotoShop. PhotoShop is a name Adobe made up. So KPhotoShop would not fly and I think every open source zealot knows it.
But Illustrator just describes what the program does. There's no reason it shouldn't be available for others to describe their programs. (That includes legal precedent as well as "my opinions")
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
This somehow implies that being able to quickly download and Open Source applications is somehow in competition with.NET which is about XML web services. It is a thing of particular bemusement to me that Open Source advocates and Slashdot editors keep attacking a.NET which is a figment of their imaginations and has nothing to do with what truly constitutes.NET (which can be gleaned from just reading the.NET website).
Have you read any of the.NET technical docs? Because looking at them I would say this "figment of our imagination".NET isn't too far from the mark. The way I read it it's basically like java, only for stuff written in any language. Which is essentially an easy way to "[be] able to quickly download and [run] applications". Which is how this whole non-competing competition thing is. Go read up more, then post, thank you.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
I can recall one of the engineers saying something like, "We [MS] wouldn't have a chance if people with REAL talent [professional programmers] were contributing to the free software movement. Thank god the only people who really contribute are kiddies."
We in the free software world wonder the same thing about Microsoft all the time.
As Linus once said, "Microsoft isn't evil, they just make crappy operating systems."
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
They were doing this as a service to all the stupid Admins out there that mess up their W2K system because they are to retarded to read the manual and set up a good security protocol, and then go on slashdot and complain that Microsoft sucks because the knowledge to set up the server wasn't so obvious a chimp could set it up.
And yet we all can set up our linux boxes just fine. So you're saying linux is so simple a chimp could set it up?
My personal experience with MS products is that how to do what you want to do is not in the manual. This is not stereotypical bias, it proceeds to this day. If they fixed the problem, I would stop deriding them. They don't.
Bear in mind I am someone who uses microsoft products daily, up to and including the 2k shit, and I rtfm otherwise I couldn't use linux. People who say what you just say obviously never used UNIX systems because it's umpossible to be a linux user without being a manual-reader.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Taco, man, come on. The dude's name is Orlando Jones. Funny guy from The Replacements and not a bad actor.
Yeah, and I recall seeing him referred to as the make seven up yours guy in reviews for that movie too. In mainstream media magazines, no less. So what's your beef?
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
I think you mean gorillas. At least I/hope/ you do. A guerilla is somebody who participates in guerilla warfare or the use of guerilla tactics and after evolution they probably don't look like the apes from 2001.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
I don't think they/care/ if he's going to blow himself up, as long as he's filed a flight plan so they know/where/ he's going to do it. If it's just him it's not really their biz if it's untested, he has to test it somehow, after all.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
You don't have to associate electronically with anybody from your own country. The world wide web is just that, world wide, so you can come read our english made-for-any-browser pages and exchange email with ppl in Europe and if anybody needs to send you something in Hebrew you can have them mail it to you. I'm assuming you guys still have a post system over there? Or they can call you on the phone. By separating your real-life associations from your virtual associations you can go farther than you would otherwise. Online you don't live anywhere but are simply a citizen of the net.
Or you could just get Windows. If you really need it. Don't let me stop you.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
There's a lot more pot-smokers who aren't hitting up convenience stores than ones who are. It's the "armed robbery" part that should be illegal, not the pot-smoking. See my point?
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Yeah, but more drunks commit crimes than non-drunks (statistically speaking, on average). More crimes are commited by humans than by non-humans (so far as the human frame of reference goes). Nobody said all drunks are criminals. Equally, this doesn't mean all humans are criminals. It just means that a) drinking and b) being human predispose one towards higher likelihoods of (certain types of (for beer)) crime. Do you insist that 100% of people who see virtual kiddie porn are pedophiles, because that would have to be your counter-argument for consistency. Of course not!! The idea they are trying to ban it on is that it "might predispose" people towards pedophilia, i.e. people who view it would have a statistically higher likelihood of commiting a certain crime, just like people drinking beer. Might as well ban beer.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Have you ever tried to "be more politically active?" I see people do it regularly, and they get arrested for it. They don't violate ay laws, but they stage protests which the cops don't like and get beaten and locked up. Then they just throw them back on the street a couple hours later so there's no record of an arrest, and no charges made, so the people have no recourse against the cops. Fun.
Simply voting does not count as being politically active. It's an agreement that the side with more votes is right and is utter bullshit.
It's perfectly safe to be as politically active as you want as long as you're aligned with a major party or lobbying group, but if you don't represent somebody who's in power, well you don't really have all the rights you're made out to have. You can flame my ignorance all you want, but I see this stuff in the flesh in my day-to-day experiences and you can't make it any less real.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Are we all 100% sure of the perfection of the FSF model, that nothing needs to be changed about it (particularly RMS)?
Dude, I think when they said to make sure that there are no differences they meant "to make sure there were no points of contention", not "to make sure they were exactly alike".
They've already announced they are going to have localized chapters, so we know at least some things are going to be changed.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Slashdot Mirror
What if all I would do would be to say "Ow, you bastard, why did you do that?"
Some of us don't have the automatic reaction to punch back. And if you keep punching, we can take it indefinitely.
And don't say it's just because we're pansies and it will eventually become necessary for us to punch back. Martin Luther King didn't win the fight against segregation by deciding "now is the time to punch back", but by deciding, "never is the time to punch back."
72% of Americans think it would be helpful.
72% of Americans are not Computer Science majors. (or whatever else would be applicable)
Kind of like that journalist whose knee-jerk reaction to email viruses(/worms) was to insist we all implement and use digital signatures. Evidently it never occured that we get the pathogens from our family and friends (they're sent to everybody in your address book) and thus the malicious packages would still be properly signed.
In fact, one of the first thoughts that entered my head last Tuesday morning was the possibility this whole thing might have been engineered by some element within our own government in order to increase the scope of its power in the backlash.
Granted now I'm leaning toward Islamic fundamentalists as most of us have been, and as I have been since then but still the possibility isn't ruled out.
The mere fact that I'm considered unpatriotic and traitorous for not supporting every damn thing our government comes up with this past week just confirms my suspicion that people are trying to take advantage of the public's succeptibility to suggestion at times like this, at the very least.
The response that "we need more restrictions and tougher laws/more athority to combat these menaces" is itself a knee-jerk reaction.
I don't know which authorities are saying that these people used email to communicate, and did it encryptedly, but I've never seen any terrorist activities linked to the internet substantively (by which I mean they actually siezed somebody's pc and used the key on their hard drive to decrypt messages plotting terrorist attacks, rather than simply "we suspect" and "authorities think")
The attack itself was painfully low-tech. Why? Because all our countermeasures are aimed at preventing technological threats. So a low-tech threat slips past them. Thus there is reason to believe their coordination was low-tech as well: With all the emails, pagers, and telephones in the world you still can't beat good old face to face contact when you don't want to be snooped on. Once again, our countermeasurse are directed at a high-tech threat, and a low-tech approach can bypass them completely. The depressing thing about the new airline regulations prohibiting box cutters and all knives is that I could still get weapons onto a plane if I needed to. (no I'm not saying how, better I'm the only one who knows than some crazy kook who would actually do it finds out how)
Assuming the key players met face to face to plan this out (the smart thing to do since any other way would be subject to electronic monitoring) they could have easily established code words/phrases, like for instance "I bought a new pair of shoes" would mean that tomorrow morning the attack was to be carried out as discussed, "I need to go do laundry today" would mean to abort the plans. We would now need to suspect everybody who emails/phones each other discussing the mundane details of their personal lives! You could hide things in plain sight and crypto-busting power wouldn't mean shit.
Even if the perpetrators of this attack weren't doing things the good old-fashioned way, if we gave our government sweeping crypto-cracking powers all it would take would be one terrorist getting caught, and all the rest would look to history and switch to doing things the way that's worked for centuries. Then all the government would be getting out of our encrypted email would be the personal information of those of us who use crypto because we don't want stalkers who know our daily schedule or such. The reverse of "If you've done nothing wrong, you'll have nothing to hide." will be what's true, since the people who are doing wrong things will be hiding it all in plain sight.
Authorities were unable to stop this incident because the terrorists had thought of something that had never been tried before. Previously pilots and other airline employees were instructed to comply with all demands of hijackers, under the assumption that the worst risk was the safety of those on the plane and that cooperation would lead to safety. This was a perfectly reasonable assumption to draw until last Tuesday because that was how all prior hijackings had worked. Now instructions are different. Nobody anticipated that an airplane would be used as a massive bomb. The attack got past us simply because we did not anticipate an attack of this type.
No matter how hard we crack down, there will always be people thinking of news ways to kill us because we can only crack down with the anticipation of certain types of attacks. As long as a way of attacking exists which we have not yet thought of, we will be vulnerable and somebody out there will think of it and use it on us. (this theory is also applied in computer security, as you hear peole say "there's no such thing as secure, only more secure and less secure") All we can really do is make ourselves less of a target, and remove the sickeningly efficient and obvious ways to achieve mass death, like nukes.
Just to clarify, the president in question was dead by the end of that war and his successor, Harry Truman, authorized the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
All these replies about beer reminded me of a couple software packages I've downloaded that were "beer ware": basically if you like the program and use it a lot you are encouraged to send the developer a case of beer. Sounds like a good license to me!
This sounds a lot like if Microsoft were to go after Corel (or anybody else) for using the name Office (Wordperfect Office). Why haven't they already? Because as any IP expert will tell you, the trademark is Microsoft Office, not just Office. It's meaningless without the MS in front of it.
Ditto Adobe Illustrator and the word "illustrator".
This is not the same as PhotoShop. PhotoShop is a name Adobe made up. So KPhotoShop would not fly and I think every open source zealot knows it.
But Illustrator just describes what the program does. There's no reason it shouldn't be available for others to describe their programs. (That includes legal precedent as well as "my opinions")
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
This somehow implies that being able to quickly download and Open Source applications is somehow in competition with .NET which is about XML web services. It is a thing of particular bemusement to me that Open Source advocates and Slashdot editors keep attacking a .NET which is a figment of their imaginations and has nothing to do with what truly constitutes .NET (which can be gleaned from just reading the .NET website).
.NET technical docs? Because looking at them I would say this "figment of our imagination" .NET isn't too far from the mark. The way I read it it's basically like java, only for stuff written in any language. Which is essentially an easy way to "[be] able to quickly download and [run] applications". Which is how this whole non-competing competition thing is. Go read up more, then post, thank you.
Have you read any of the
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
I can recall one of the engineers saying something like, "We [MS] wouldn't have a chance if people with REAL talent [professional programmers] were contributing to the free software movement. Thank god the only people who really contribute are kiddies."
We in the free software world wonder the same thing about Microsoft all the time.
As Linus once said, "Microsoft isn't evil, they just make crappy operating systems."
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
It's another video game movie marketed at 13-17 year old males who like tits!
I'm 18 and I liked it! 13-17, bah.
Though how the hell the Mayans got to Cambodia, well that part was stretching even Hollywood creative license a bit.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
They were doing this as a service to all the stupid Admins out there that mess up their W2K system because they are to retarded to read the manual and set up a good security protocol, and then go on slashdot and complain that Microsoft sucks because the knowledge to set up the server wasn't so obvious a chimp could set it up.
And yet we all can set up our linux boxes just fine. So you're saying linux is so simple a chimp could set it up?
My personal experience with MS products is that how to do what you want to do is not in the manual. This is not stereotypical bias, it proceeds to this day. If they fixed the problem, I would stop deriding them. They don't.
Bear in mind I am someone who uses microsoft products daily, up to and including the 2k shit, and I rtfm otherwise I couldn't use linux. People who say what you just say obviously never used UNIX systems because it's umpossible to be a linux user without being a manual-reader.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Yes, but were they aware of the backdoors in windows? If they had source they would have needed to fork that too, I guarantee you.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Taco, man, come on. The dude's name is Orlando Jones. Funny guy from The Replacements and not a bad actor.
Yeah, and I recall seeing him referred to as the make seven up yours guy in reviews for that movie too. In mainstream media magazines, no less. So what's your beef?
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
I think you mean gorillas. At least I /hope/ you do. A guerilla is somebody who participates in guerilla warfare or the use of guerilla tactics and after evolution they probably don't look like the apes from 2001.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
whenever I get around to it
not a suggestion, just what that made me think of
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
I don't think they /care/ if he's going to blow himself up, as long as he's filed a flight plan so they know /where/ he's going to do it. If it's just him it's not really their biz if it's untested, he has to test it somehow, after all.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Just wait 'til I trademark each of the letters of the alphabet individuallty!!!!Muwhahahha!!!!!
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
2001-03-01 12:01:27
bypass to lameness filter bypass to lameness filter bypass to lameness filter bypass to lameness filter
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
You don't have to associate electronically with anybody from your own country. The world wide web is just that, world wide, so you can come read our english made-for-any-browser pages and exchange email with ppl in Europe and if anybody needs to send you something in Hebrew you can have them mail it to you. I'm assuming you guys still have a post system over there? Or they can call you on the phone. By separating your real-life associations from your virtual associations you can go farther than you would otherwise. Online you don't live anywhere but are simply a citizen of the net.
Or you could just get Windows. If you really need it. Don't let me stop you.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
I'm going to print this out and laugh when every single thing in Katz's article comes true.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
There's a lot more pot-smokers who aren't hitting up convenience stores than ones who are. It's the "armed robbery" part that should be illegal, not the pot-smoking. See my point?
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Yeah, but more drunks commit crimes than non-drunks (statistically speaking, on average). More crimes are commited by humans than by non-humans (so far as the human frame of reference goes). Nobody said all drunks are criminals. Equally, this doesn't mean all humans are criminals. It just means that a) drinking and b) being human predispose one towards higher likelihoods of (certain types of (for beer)) crime. Do you insist that 100% of people who see virtual kiddie porn are pedophiles, because that would have to be your counter-argument for consistency. Of course not!! The idea they are trying to ban it on is that it "might predispose" people towards pedophilia, i.e. people who view it would have a statistically higher likelihood of commiting a certain crime, just like people drinking beer. Might as well ban beer.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Have you ever tried to "be more politically active?" I see people do it regularly, and they get arrested for it. They don't violate ay laws, but they stage protests which the cops don't like and get beaten and locked up. Then they just throw them back on the street a couple hours later so there's no record of an arrest, and no charges made, so the people have no recourse against the cops. Fun.
Simply voting does not count as being politically active. It's an agreement that the side with more votes is right and is utter bullshit.
It's perfectly safe to be as politically active as you want as long as you're aligned with a major party or lobbying group, but if you don't represent somebody who's in power, well you don't really have all the rights you're made out to have. You can flame my ignorance all you want, but I see this stuff in the flesh in my day-to-day experiences and you can't make it any less real.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
Are we all 100% sure of the perfection of the FSF model, that nothing needs to be changed about it (particularly RMS)?
Dude, I think when they said to make sure that there are no differences they meant "to make sure there were no points of contention", not "to make sure they were exactly alike".
They've already announced they are going to have localized chapters, so we know at least some things are going to be changed.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
When I first read this, I thought to myself, what a bunch of lazy bums! Why don't they support theirselves.
When I first read this, I thought to myself, what a lazy bum! Why don't you use proper grammar.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?