The rights that you so glibly take for granted were gradually wrested from various despotic governments over the past few centuries. Even quite recently, people faced firehoses, dogs, tear gas and bullets while fighting against various government agencies that used secretly gathered files of personal information. There have been a number of privacy violating scandals in the current White House, implicating the President and the First Lady. Where have you been? What if the fineprint in the Slashdot privacy policy said that nitwits who endlessly repeat laissez-faire libertarian arguments can be shot: you agreed to it... can we shoot you?
And without the Big Brother spectre that operates against anyone caught up in political struggles, the very practical reason we need to keep worrying about it today is that this data is being gathered for all time. When I need to buy a new car, I don't want the salesman to have access to piles of information about me and my tastes because that information can be used to extract a higher price from me. A fundamental assumption of free-market economic theory is that both parties to a transaction have equal information. If one side has been spying, the benefits of free-market trading are lost.
hey, since they're gonna get sued anyway, I hope they're cutting out all the commercials and playing mp3s from major artists instead, and replacing the credits at the end of the shows with the scrolling text of Microsoft's ill-conceived kerberos plans:) Then, late at night they could turn the programming over to infomercials hawking mislabelled Athlons, binary-only linux cds, and copies of decss.
Why not? they say there's no such thing as bad PR!
Your letter is downright dippy. The people who work at the Washington Post will not have a clue what you mean by "flamebait". And that bit about "defend till the death..." Yow! I didn't think anything could look more pretentious than using that quote, but I think you pulled it off:) I'm not flaming you, just trying to get you to defend me till death.
First, there are no such things as "true meanings." Meaning in language is created when reference is secured.
I think you're on the right track, but (a) you are giving primacy only to the listener and (b) you are using the word "meaning" where you should be using the word "definition". If you look from the point of view of the speaker, there is such a thing as a "true meaning." The words available may have ambiguous definitions, or the definitions may not be shared with the listener, but the speaker means what the speaker is trying to say, truly and unambiguously. (70% of the bitching on slashdot could be avoided if people looked for the meaning that the poster intended). And this is more or less the meaning you intended. I just wanted to tighten up your definitions.
portable universal translators? on early 21st century earth? wouldn't the ahistorical introduction of such a device be a violation of the Prime Directive so severe that it would necessitate the intervention of the Temporal Police?
at first I looked forward to the competition and choices and I vowed to never use NetworkSolutions again because they've been such assholes.
However, I admin a colo and as a favor to friends I host their domains. After the first one registered with an alternate domain, I realized that I would have to establish a technical contact at each alternate registry, and learn how they do it and... and suddenly, it just seems simpler to keep using Network Solutions. I'll have to think of some other way to punish them.
so what? provide a suite of N libraries which each provide the same functionality in a different way so that we don't need to reinvent the wheel N times, where N is the number of different ways that you find sufficient.
Not everybody is or wants to be a security expert.
I subscribe to BugTraq, a mailing list devoted to security. (you can find archives buried in the horrible security focused website.) After a while you get a good idea of the range of security holes and mistakes that allow them. But, IMO many of them could be avoided if the fix was put in the development environment, and not in the app. Then, other apps could benefit from it as well and not repeat the error.
A great example of this is if an application needs to create a temporary file. Temp directories are publically accessible, they need to be. But this means more than one user has access to them (if your OS can handle multiple users:) and this provides a place where malicious users can interfere. There's a lot of bending over backwards you can do to detect or avoid the problem, but the so-called experts seem to think that everybody should learn every trick and apply it manually. Why not provide API calls that allow a programmer to SecureFileOpen() and get a secure open file?
So, I haven't read the source for this Piranha web admin package to see why the default password Q was in there, but I suspect the coder working on it put it in as a convenience to herself for development purposes, so she could test things without having to create accounts every time. But, every app with passwords needs to do this because it is just as tedious as for every programmer. So why not build pseudo test accounts into the platform just for this purpose, rather than into the app?
they sold 'em all at the factory... this means they're in the pipeline and in the shops. It means there might be some spot shortages or delays, but you'll still be able to find them.
Re:Those are not PC's, those are industrial SBC's
on
Quad G4 Boards
·
· Score: 1
These systems go into applications for which your desktop PC (or Mac) would quickly fail.
... but these devices have their limits too. Hardened against EMP, yes, but they are still unable to withstand Slashdotting... check it out.
I believe that the point of the author is that no such break-the-mold improvement has been made in the past
half-century.
but areas of knowledge, the "truth" about the universe, is in some sense finite. Once you learn something, you learn it and you don't necessarily want to break that mold. Newtonian mechanics is a very good approximation for how the universe works and it was used effectively for a lot of technology for a long time. It is still taught. We can hardly blame those who followed Newton for not throwing it all away. Once its fractional errors were uncovered, a new theory was propounded pretty recently to correct it, but we can hardly be blamed for not throwing it away.
Quantum mechanics, from the first half of the last century, was exploited technologically in the second half. The discovery of DNA 50 years ago has only now begun to be exploited and the next 50 years will see dramatic technological exploitation. Add to that nanotechnology, optical, quantum... There are many more examples, past present and future, in materials science, information theory, blah blah... I just don't see that a case can be made that there has been any sort of slowdown or tailing off. There are periods of time where some frontiers move more quickly, where some costs drop more dramatically. Someday perhaps mankind will know everything we can know, but we are just nowhere near there.
Remember that old story about them wanting to shut the patent office 100 years ago? IBM predicting only 6 computers would be needed worldwide? I mean, how can anybody want to be on that side of the argument? Oh, because this time it's true? I don't think so.
Slashdot Mirror
And without the Big Brother spectre that operates against anyone caught up in political struggles, the very practical reason we need to keep worrying about it today is that this data is being gathered for all time. When I need to buy a new car, I don't want the salesman to have access to piles of information about me and my tastes because that information can be used to extract a higher price from me. A fundamental assumption of free-market economic theory is that both parties to a transaction have equal information. If one side has been spying, the benefits of free-market trading are lost.
so, the MRA is looking to add "reads Slashdot" to the list of IP addresses it tracks? Like you said... you don't have a privacy policy.
Why not? they say there's no such thing as bad PR!
If you are a contractor, you retain the copyright unless it says otherwise in your contract, even if you use company resources.
they are not obliged to release anything if they use the software internally and do not distribute it.
Your letter is downright dippy. The people who work at the Washington Post will not have a clue what you mean by "flamebait". And that bit about "defend till the death..." Yow! I didn't think anything could look more pretentious than using that quote, but I think you pulled it off :) I'm not flaming you, just trying to get you to defend me till death.
I think you're on the right track, but (a) you are giving primacy only to the listener and (b) you are using the word "meaning" where you should be using the word "definition". If you look from the point of view of the speaker, there is such a thing as a "true meaning." The words available may have ambiguous definitions, or the definitions may not be shared with the listener, but the speaker means what the speaker is trying to say, truly and unambiguously. (70% of the bitching on slashdot could be avoided if people looked for the meaning that the poster intended). And this is more or less the meaning you intended. I just wanted to tighten up your definitions.
What Microsoft is describing is exactly how the OS half of the company should behave after the breakup :)
portable universal translators? on early 21st century earth? wouldn't the ahistorical introduction of such a device be a violation of the Prime Directive so severe that it would necessitate the intervention of the Temporal Police?
Is this a trick question? I'll bite: the answer is, using free sites and refusing to look at any advertising! :)
However, I admin a colo and as a favor to friends I host their domains. After the first one registered with an alternate domain, I realized that I would have to establish a technical contact at each alternate registry, and learn how they do it and... and suddenly, it just seems simpler to keep using Network Solutions. I'll have to think of some other way to punish them.
Not everybody is or wants to be a security expert.
A great example of this is if an application needs to create a temporary file. Temp directories are publically accessible, they need to be. But this means more than one user has access to them (if your OS can handle multiple users :) and this provides a place where malicious users can interfere. There's a lot of bending over backwards you can do to detect or avoid the problem, but the so-called experts seem to think that everybody should learn every trick and apply it manually. Why not provide API calls that allow a programmer to SecureFileOpen() and get a secure open file?
So, I haven't read the source for this Piranha web admin package to see why the default password Q was in there, but I suspect the coder working on it put it in as a convenience to herself for development purposes, so she could test things without having to create accounts every time. But, every app with passwords needs to do this because it is just as tedious as for every programmer. So why not build pseudo test accounts into the platform just for this purpose, rather than into the app?
hey, the Kraftwerk website is fun. I wish there was more there, but you'll have fun.
they sold 'em all at the factory... this means they're in the pipeline and in the shops. It means there might be some spot shortages or delays, but you'll still be able to find them.
but areas of knowledge, the "truth" about the universe, is in some sense finite. Once you learn something, you learn it and you don't necessarily want to break that mold. Newtonian mechanics is a very good approximation for how the universe works and it was used effectively for a lot of technology for a long time. It is still taught. We can hardly blame those who followed Newton for not throwing it all away. Once its fractional errors were uncovered, a new theory was propounded pretty recently to correct it, but we can hardly be blamed for not throwing it away.
Quantum mechanics, from the first half of the last century, was exploited technologically in the second half. The discovery of DNA 50 years ago has only now begun to be exploited and the next 50 years will see dramatic technological exploitation. Add to that nanotechnology, optical, quantum... There are many more examples, past present and future, in materials science, information theory, blah blah... I just don't see that a case can be made that there has been any sort of slowdown or tailing off. There are periods of time where some frontiers move more quickly, where some costs drop more dramatically. Someday perhaps mankind will know everything we can know, but we are just nowhere near there.
Remember that old story about them wanting to shut the patent office 100 years ago? IBM predicting only 6 computers would be needed worldwide? I mean, how can anybody want to be on that side of the argument? Oh, because this time it's true? I don't think so.