We clearly can't work off of names, as they aren't unique. Every person on the planet ought to be assigned a number. Since terrorists would just refuse to give up their number, we'll just implant a chip containing that number. Then, our watchlists will be perfect.
Poll switchers are paying lip service in order to attain power. You can't trust that what they say is what they'll do, and if they're lying, you pay for the mistake of electing them for four years before you get the chance to do anything about it. True believers, hopefully, have a position that they'll stick with if they're elected, so at least you have an idea of how they'll set their policies before you vote. However, they're highly unlikely to match all of the beliefs of any significant segment of the population, so they'll never get elected as long as the flip-floppers and smooth talkers keep running.
I think the problem is that the federal government is simply too powerful. The federal government is supposed to have a few specific, limited powers as granted them by the Constitution. Everything else is left to the states. There are 50 of them. It's pretty likely that you can find one that fits you pretty well (even if not perfectly). Except that these days, the differences between the states are mostly trivial little things like speed limits, age of consent, etc. and issues which are directly tied to budgets, such as education. Everything else has been taken by the federal government by stretching the bounds of the Constitution until it's nearly broken. This means that the president of the USA has an immense amount of power--more power than a person representing slightly more than half the population should have.
I guess that would work, but restricting HTML to a limited subset seems somehow worse than creating a new markup. As a user, how do I know which options to a given HTML tag are allowed? As a web programmer, how do I know whether script is embeddable in some of those options for any given random browser that people might use? (Opera? What's that? Safari? I don't have a Mac (ok, Apple addressed this one)).
For the user who is familiar with HTML, BBcode-alikes provide a visual cue to differing semantics. If I know that I'm allowed to create an anchor tag, for example, I might think that I'm allowed to style it, too. Or create an onmouseover event for it. If, instead, I create a [a] tag or a [url] tag, I don't come to the site with preconceived notions about what I might be able to do.
For the web programmer, I don't have to worry about browser differences. I don't have to worry that something slipped through the cracks, or that a different character set allowed code to get through, or any of the other user-input trickery could have occurred. If my script doesn't output user-submitted HTML, and doesn't output script, then I know definitively that I'm safe.
Something like BBcode would be just fine. The problem with HTMl/XML is that you can embed script in many, many tags. Validating each of these is a chore. Worse, some browsers might have bugs which allow script in tags you wouldn't expect.
With BBcode-like tags, you strip all HTML tags, period. They're either quoted so that they show up as raw text, or they are removed entirely. But the magic BBcode tags are transformed into HTML. [b] becomes <b>, [/b] becomes </b>. [b script=blah] is malformed and removed.
The problem comes when they try to get too clever. They basically start re-implementing HTML, which leads to greater abstraction. At this point, they might be better off parsing HTML, except for the fact that they control BBcode. HTML can change, browsers can implement it incorrectly, but you control your own strange tags, and how they map to actual HTML.
The web was also supposed to be cross-platform. But poor implementations of specifications blow that out of the water. You have to work around bugs in CSS/Javascript implementations if you want medium-high complexity features in your pages. No doubt being unable to test iPhone apps on Windows would simply kill the 3rd party software market.
Operating systems are complex beasts. It's not just in Windows where a patch has broken existing functionality. In fact, OS X has had this (patches broke wireless on many Apple Intel laptops not too long ago), and I really can't tell you how many times I've updated my Linux kernel (past) or installed an Ubuntu security update (present) and had some part of my computer's functionality disappear. The reason it appears to happen so much more often with Windows is simple: on the deskotp, Windows has 9 times the userbase of OS X and Linux, combined.
So patch deployment cost is high. With more machines (in more configurations) running Windows, testing patches to ensure that they won't break critical functionality is not only important--it's necessary. You don't want to deploy a patch company-wide, and all of a sudden have your entire company virtually shut down because of an unanticipated bug.
If a kid drowns in your pool, and you did not try to prevent the kid from getting to your pool (by way of surrounding it with a fence), you are held responsible for the death.
With regard to digital media, making copies is tantamount to giving it away. It's very hard to make this analogy work, because the digital world differs so much from the real world. You really have to just start using judgement.
If I copy a CD and give it to you (and you keep it), who is responsible? If I copy a CD to my hard drive and e-mail the contents to you and several of my friends (and you and they keep the contents), who is at fault? If I provide you with the ability to make copies of copyrighted digital documents to which I don't own the copyright, and you make those copies, who is at fault?
In all of the situations, I believe that there is some amount of shared responsibility, though in each new question I posed, the amount of responsibility I must accept reduces, and the amount of responsibility you must accept increases, culminating in the final question, where I believe that both parties are equally at fault.
It's hard to legally justify making available whole copies of copyrighted material (for which you do not have distribution rights) to the general public. Even considering the doctrine of Fair Use, it just doesn't work. I don't think that this kid stands a chance of winning this argument.
or it's actually not pure software - perhaps a pre-packaged OS plus hardware plus support for an appliance type system. Yeah. I guess you missed the two places in the summary where this is mentioned:
I want to start (very small) software/hardware business.
I am planning to sell embedded-like boxes with an OS (Linux or BSD) and this code.
The reason that it can make a difference is that, as others have pointed out, if the hardware he is selling is commodity hardware (maybe Soekris boxes?) then he's offering little or no incentive to purchase his product for a premium when someone can buy a box, download the code, and use his work for free.
No, it wasn't. The post I replied to said:
Those neat-o AJAX apps won't be too much fun on a GPRS connection that is about as fast as a 56K modem (and in my experience, you get a burst of data, then nothing, then a burst, then nothing, ad infinitum).
A partial one, if nothing else. I imagine they will expose ways to interact with the iPhone, and they will probably require user-confirmation that, "Yes, I really want this javascript application to dial out." But it won't be an SDK to create native applications, which is what I think people mean when they say the words, "No iPhone SDK"
Actually, properly developed AJAX-like applications should function better in these circumstances. No need to reload most of the page elements to display a single change, and in many applications, you're likely to need bursts rather than high, sustained transfer rates.
From the keynote yesterday, it wasn't clear whether the apps would have to be online, at all. You could have a Javascript application running in the Safari context that could do a lot of stuff. If it's capable of accessing the net, even better. We already know that there will be a capability for these applications to access the address book and initiate calls (at least, I believe that's what Jobs said). I certainly wouldn't expect to have to connect to the web and download the application every time just to perform simple tasks like this.
Maybe in the past, they've had more technical discussions. Monday's keynote was primarily a feature breakdown of Leopard, an announcement that games are coming to OS X, and a note that 3rd party development on the iPhone will be through Safari. I don't remember them mentioning anything so technological as filesystem choices, etc. In fact, given the recent redaction from TFA (that ZFS will be available in Leopard just not the default), my point holds even more. Steve could have announced the option of ZFS for secondary disks, but didn't.
I don't expect that ZFS would be a major announcement from Apple. It's too techie. The keynotes tend to focus on whiz-bang interface features. ZFS might have been the driving file system behind Time Machine, but when the announcement came, it would be all about Time Machine, not ZFS.
The recent product upgrades means that the Macbook Pro doesn't ship with less than 2GB of RAM. My guess is that as they upgrade the rest of their product lines (plenty of time before October) you'll start to see the base configurations of their high-end equipment (Mac Pro and the larger iMacs) ship with 2GB standard, and probably a bump up to 1GB standard for the Mini and Macbook.
As I understand it, 2GB on FreeBSD 7 is plenty to run the OS very comfortably with ZFS. Also, the people who are likely to use ZFS right now are power users, so they'll be getting more RAM anyway. Before it becomes standard in the OS, Apple will probably have 4GB/2GB in their pro/commodity lines, which will allow them to maintain the current level of performance while using ZFS.
If it takes nearly 2 years for the next release of OS X to come out, I'm confident that ZFS will be the default OS (barring a decision to avoid this due to case sensitivity issues)
Nope. We were talking about actions that individuals do, not the repercussions of the police. Try to keep on target.
Black: Do all sorts of crazy things, hoping that The Man won't come down on you. White: Never do anything which might cause The Man to come down on you, specifically because someone else did something illegal, but made it look like you did. Gray: Protect yourself from the consequences which you subjectively decide are not worth dealing with given the potential gains/losses and difficulty in implementing the protection scheme. Even though it's statistically unlikely that someone will intentionally use my wide-open wireless internet connection to break the law, the consequences of such an act are extremely high. The benefit of leaving my connection open is almost nil, and it's easy to secure. I therefore decide to lock down my connection. If I had more benefits from leaving it wide open (for example, say I have legacy hardware which does not support encryption) then I might decide that the gains outweigh the risks. In this case, I don't.
Are you seriously suggesting the guy should never use wifi again, just to avoid this situation in the future? I didn't say anything of the sort. In fact, I didn't even reference this case at all. You're putting words in my mouth, making terribly unsubstantiated inferences, or both.
As I said, you weigh the risks against the benefits. There is no correct answer that applies to every situation.
1) Never do ANYTHING that those 'idiots in charge' might EVER mistake for illegal. No, apparently you, like many people, don't understand that there are gray areas. It's not a binary choice. It's risk management, and I have decided that the risks aren't worth it. Besides, it's not mistaking things as being illegal, it's mistaking who is the person performing the illegal act. In the online world, where connections from one IP address can be made from many, many different people, it's pretty hard to tell who is doing something bad. It may be that the police shouldn't try, but they do, and therefore, I choose to reduce risk by limiting who is allowed to use the IP address that my ISP assigns to me.
2) Get rid of the idiots and get SMART people in charge. (Or at least technology-wise people) I try every time there's an election. Unfortunately, it never seems to work.
I receive no benefits from opening up my wifi. I receive benefits if someone else does.
That said, the problem is the current laws and administration. They don't understand that an IP address received from your ISP does not uniquely identify the end-user. Furthermore, the absurd invasion of my home and holding of my property in computer-based crimes is unreal. They'll take your computers, all your media (even obviously retail DVDs), your gaming systems, your TiVo, your VCR.... And that's without any proof that you did anything. It's evidence that they hold while they build the case, and in some states, you may never get it back, even if no case is brought against you. Even assuming that they'll hold the stuff until the statute of limitations passes, it might as well be forever.
Computers aren't well understood by the police and courts, and thus they take everything overboard. I don't want to be one of the cases where my connection is abused and my life is turned upside down because of the ignorance of those in charge.
I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Can you guess what it is? Give up? It's my Pagerank score, and mine happens to be 86.
That's what this situation reminds me of. Credit scores (which is what the above lines reference) are calculated by an algorithm, and they can be wrong. If they are, you can get the company to adjust them, provided that you can provide evidence that their input is faulty. I see no reason that this case should be any different, provided the inputs (reasons for the ranking) are well known.
In the case of Google, however, they are providing a ranking rather than a rating. It is much, much harder to objectively rank webpage relevance based on search terms, and even harder to know whether a given ranking is justified when you don't even know the algorithm used.
I'd tried it before and found problems (I think it was SSL not working, but I could be misremembering). Seems to work well, now, so thanks for reminding me of it!
I'm also going to look into Finch. Options are a wonderful thing.
Slashdot Mirror
We clearly can't work off of names, as they aren't unique. Every person on the planet ought to be assigned a number. Since terrorists would just refuse to give up their number, we'll just implant a chip containing that number. Then, our watchlists will be perfect.
Digital Angel, here we come!
So, have you stopped beating your wife, yet?
Poll switchers are paying lip service in order to attain power. You can't trust that what they say is what they'll do, and if they're lying, you pay for the mistake of electing them for four years before you get the chance to do anything about it. True believers, hopefully, have a position that they'll stick with if they're elected, so at least you have an idea of how they'll set their policies before you vote. However, they're highly unlikely to match all of the beliefs of any significant segment of the population, so they'll never get elected as long as the flip-floppers and smooth talkers keep running.
I think the problem is that the federal government is simply too powerful. The federal government is supposed to have a few specific, limited powers as granted them by the Constitution. Everything else is left to the states. There are 50 of them. It's pretty likely that you can find one that fits you pretty well (even if not perfectly). Except that these days, the differences between the states are mostly trivial little things like speed limits, age of consent, etc. and issues which are directly tied to budgets, such as education. Everything else has been taken by the federal government by stretching the bounds of the Constitution until it's nearly broken. This means that the president of the USA has an immense amount of power--more power than a person representing slightly more than half the population should have.
I guess that would work, but restricting HTML to a limited subset seems somehow worse than creating a new markup. As a user, how do I know which options to a given HTML tag are allowed? As a web programmer, how do I know whether script is embeddable in some of those options for any given random browser that people might use? (Opera? What's that? Safari? I don't have a Mac (ok, Apple addressed this one)).
For the user who is familiar with HTML, BBcode-alikes provide a visual cue to differing semantics. If I know that I'm allowed to create an anchor tag, for example, I might think that I'm allowed to style it, too. Or create an onmouseover event for it. If, instead, I create a [a] tag or a [url] tag, I don't come to the site with preconceived notions about what I might be able to do.
For the web programmer, I don't have to worry about browser differences. I don't have to worry that something slipped through the cracks, or that a different character set allowed code to get through, or any of the other user-input trickery could have occurred. If my script doesn't output user-submitted HTML, and doesn't output script, then I know definitively that I'm safe.
Something like BBcode would be just fine. The problem with HTMl/XML is that you can embed script in many, many tags. Validating each of these is a chore. Worse, some browsers might have bugs which allow script in tags you wouldn't expect.
With BBcode-like tags, you strip all HTML tags, period. They're either quoted so that they show up as raw text, or they are removed entirely. But the magic BBcode tags are transformed into HTML. [b] becomes <b>, [/b] becomes </b>. [b script=blah] is malformed and removed.
The problem comes when they try to get too clever. They basically start re-implementing HTML, which leads to greater abstraction. At this point, they might be better off parsing HTML, except for the fact that they control BBcode. HTML can change, browsers can implement it incorrectly, but you control your own strange tags, and how they map to actual HTML.
The web was also supposed to be cross-platform. But poor implementations of specifications blow that out of the water. You have to work around bugs in CSS/Javascript implementations if you want medium-high complexity features in your pages. No doubt being unable to test iPhone apps on Windows would simply kill the 3rd party software market.
Operating systems are complex beasts. It's not just in Windows where a patch has broken existing functionality. In fact, OS X has had this (patches broke wireless on many Apple Intel laptops not too long ago), and I really can't tell you how many times I've updated my Linux kernel (past) or installed an Ubuntu security update (present) and had some part of my computer's functionality disappear. The reason it appears to happen so much more often with Windows is simple: on the deskotp, Windows has 9 times the userbase of OS X and Linux, combined.
So patch deployment cost is high. With more machines (in more configurations) running Windows, testing patches to ensure that they won't break critical functionality is not only important--it's necessary. You don't want to deploy a patch company-wide, and all of a sudden have your entire company virtually shut down because of an unanticipated bug.
Also, begging the question does not mean what you think it means.
It's called an attractive nuisance. Look it up.
If a kid drowns in your pool, and you did not try to prevent the kid from getting to your pool (by way of surrounding it with a fence), you are held responsible for the death.
With regard to digital media, making copies is tantamount to giving it away. It's very hard to make this analogy work, because the digital world differs so much from the real world. You really have to just start using judgement.
If I copy a CD and give it to you (and you keep it), who is responsible? If I copy a CD to my hard drive and e-mail the contents to you and several of my friends (and you and they keep the contents), who is at fault? If I provide you with the ability to make copies of copyrighted digital documents to which I don't own the copyright, and you make those copies, who is at fault?
In all of the situations, I believe that there is some amount of shared responsibility, though in each new question I posed, the amount of responsibility I must accept reduces, and the amount of responsibility you must accept increases, culminating in the final question, where I believe that both parties are equally at fault.
It's hard to legally justify making available whole copies of copyrighted material (for which you do not have distribution rights) to the general public. Even considering the doctrine of Fair Use, it just doesn't work. I don't think that this kid stands a chance of winning this argument.
I want to start (very small) software/hardware business.
I am planning to sell embedded-like boxes with an OS (Linux or BSD) and this code.
The reason that it can make a difference is that, as others have pointed out, if the hardware he is selling is commodity hardware (maybe Soekris boxes?) then he's offering little or no incentive to purchase his product for a premium when someone can buy a box, download the code, and use his work for free.
Good day to you.
A partial one, if nothing else. I imagine they will expose ways to interact with the iPhone, and they will probably require user-confirmation that, "Yes, I really want this javascript application to dial out." But it won't be an SDK to create native applications, which is what I think people mean when they say the words, "No iPhone SDK"
Actually, properly developed AJAX-like applications should function better in these circumstances. No need to reload most of the page elements to display a single change, and in many applications, you're likely to need bursts rather than high, sustained transfer rates.
From the keynote yesterday, it wasn't clear whether the apps would have to be online, at all. You could have a Javascript application running in the Safari context that could do a lot of stuff. If it's capable of accessing the net, even better. We already know that there will be a capability for these applications to access the address book and initiate calls (at least, I believe that's what Jobs said). I certainly wouldn't expect to have to connect to the web and download the application every time just to perform simple tasks like this.
Maybe in the past, they've had more technical discussions. Monday's keynote was primarily a feature breakdown of Leopard, an announcement that games are coming to OS X, and a note that 3rd party development on the iPhone will be through Safari. I don't remember them mentioning anything so technological as filesystem choices, etc. In fact, given the recent redaction from TFA (that ZFS will be available in Leopard just not the default), my point holds even more. Steve could have announced the option of ZFS for secondary disks, but didn't.
I don't expect that ZFS would be a major announcement from Apple. It's too techie. The keynotes tend to focus on whiz-bang interface features. ZFS might have been the driving file system behind Time Machine, but when the announcement came, it would be all about Time Machine, not ZFS.
The recent product upgrades means that the Macbook Pro doesn't ship with less than 2GB of RAM. My guess is that as they upgrade the rest of their product lines (plenty of time before October) you'll start to see the base configurations of their high-end equipment (Mac Pro and the larger iMacs) ship with 2GB standard, and probably a bump up to 1GB standard for the Mini and Macbook.
As I understand it, 2GB on FreeBSD 7 is plenty to run the OS very comfortably with ZFS. Also, the people who are likely to use ZFS right now are power users, so they'll be getting more RAM anyway. Before it becomes standard in the OS, Apple will probably have 4GB/2GB in their pro/commodity lines, which will allow them to maintain the current level of performance while using ZFS.
If it takes nearly 2 years for the next release of OS X to come out, I'm confident that ZFS will be the default OS (barring a decision to avoid this due to case sensitivity issues)
Black: Do all sorts of crazy things, hoping that The Man won't come down on you.
White: Never do anything which might cause The Man to come down on you, specifically because someone else did something illegal, but made it look like you did.
Gray: Protect yourself from the consequences which you subjectively decide are not worth dealing with given the potential gains/losses and difficulty in implementing the protection scheme. Even though it's statistically unlikely that someone will intentionally use my wide-open wireless internet connection to break the law, the consequences of such an act are extremely high. The benefit of leaving my connection open is almost nil, and it's easy to secure. I therefore decide to lock down my connection. If I had more benefits from leaving it wide open (for example, say I have legacy hardware which does not support encryption) then I might decide that the gains outweigh the risks. In this case, I don't. Are you seriously suggesting the guy should never use wifi again, just to avoid this situation in the future? I didn't say anything of the sort. In fact, I didn't even reference this case at all. You're putting words in my mouth, making terribly unsubstantiated inferences, or both.
As I said, you weigh the risks against the benefits. There is no correct answer that applies to every situation.
I receive no benefits from opening up my wifi. I receive benefits if someone else does.
That said, the problem is the current laws and administration. They don't understand that an IP address received from your ISP does not uniquely identify the end-user. Furthermore, the absurd invasion of my home and holding of my property in computer-based crimes is unreal. They'll take your computers, all your media (even obviously retail DVDs), your gaming systems, your TiVo, your VCR.... And that's without any proof that you did anything. It's evidence that they hold while they build the case, and in some states, you may never get it back, even if no case is brought against you. Even assuming that they'll hold the stuff until the statute of limitations passes, it might as well be forever.
Computers aren't well understood by the police and courts, and thus they take everything overboard. I don't want to be one of the cases where my connection is abused and my life is turned upside down because of the ignorance of those in charge.
I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100. Can you guess what it is? Give up? It's my Pagerank score, and mine happens to be 86.
That's what this situation reminds me of. Credit scores (which is what the above lines reference) are calculated by an algorithm, and they can be wrong. If they are, you can get the company to adjust them, provided that you can provide evidence that their input is faulty. I see no reason that this case should be any different, provided the inputs (reasons for the ranking) are well known.
In the case of Google, however, they are providing a ranking rather than a rating. It is much, much harder to objectively rank webpage relevance based on search terms, and even harder to know whether a given ranking is justified when you don't even know the algorithm used.
I'll definitely check that out! If it supports jabber chats and SSL, I may well be sold!
I'd tried it before and found problems (I think it was SSL not working, but I could be misremembering). Seems to work well, now, so thanks for reminding me of it!
I'm also going to look into Finch. Options are a wonderful thing.
Thanks again!
That's just AIM, though. The article is talking about multi-service clients.
/well/ with Jabber, AIM, and MSN.
I'd just about kill for a command-line client that worked