This is a reasonable argument, but not clearly thought out, and it leads down a rather slippery sloap.
The distinction between what I said and what you've interpreted is very subtle indeed. I'm saying that because there are too many simple and sublte means of evading encryption laws aimed at making my on-line transactions LESS secure, that we should not pass such laws.
The LOSS is that we have a simple to break encryption standard in the US and Canada has the worlds most difficult to break encryption. Who gets the banking? Not the US. The economic downside of restricting encryption is too enourmous to even contemplate, IMO. And that is just one off the top of my head example.
I'm not even going to go into the issue of liberty. Every time you grant power to authority you can bet that authority will use that power to its utmost and just a bit beyond. Losing a freedom for some sense of security, particularly when that security is pure illusion, is a very poor trade.
Prohibition almost never works. And certainly not when you are prohibiting something that anyone with even a tiny bit of smarts can do on their own.
Cryptography does not even require computers, the ultimate encryption, one time pads, does not require a computer and is utterly secure as long as you maintain pad seccurity.
There are caveats to everything, oh well. Enforcing cryptographic limits on your citizens is of no value at all. If a criminal wishes to transact their business using encryption technology then there is nothing law enforcement can do about it. Period.
Only deep ignorance prevents these people from seeing the truth.
Besides embedding your message in an image, there are dozens upon dozens of ways of passing messages in plain text. Some famous examples from the past use poetry.
Enough for now, I might go off on real rant, then we'd all be unhappy.
Depends on exactly where it is that he gets sent. The "detention" centre near where I live uses the "detainees" as labour to keep the 160 acre centre looking like a park. They maintain the gardens, fences, fields and forests in pristine park like conditions.
They are given the full provincial standard education. No skipping, no slacking.
I don't know if they learn anything or not. I guess that's up to them.
It certainly isn't something that this young fellow is going to enjoy.
The recidivism rate in Canada, last I checked, for these centres is less than 1/3.
What bothers me the most about all these sort of reviews is the claim that 2.5 hours of battery time is "right up there".
It's not. I assure you. Running my Apple PowerBook with a MachBSD on it, I can easily run 4 hours on a single charge, no problem. In fact, I have often forgotten my charger at home and managed to eek out the entire day at work, about 6 hours. But that is REALLY pushing it.
Typically, when using Mac OS 9.1, I can get 4 hours, with no problem. So, how does 2 hours compare to that?
And, if you want a stable full featured Linux in a Notebook, get one of ther Macintosh Linux distro's. Or, perhaps get a serious business oriented OS, like openBSD.
You don't even need to go the full PowerBook route, you can use an iBook and get the same performance in a sub $2000cdn package.
And lastly, if I pop 2 batteries in, I can easily run 10 hours on a single charge. Enough to do an entire week long mountain expidtion, reviewing the days photos and saving them to a SuperDisk.
PS How the hell are my posts rated at 0 even when when i amlogged in?/., that's how . . .
BTW: you're right as well, and your message should be at least a 2, however, all is not fair in/. and love.
8^)
it is called "fair use" and while it is not "law" it is common law. That is to say, I don't believe that there is a formal law passed by congress called "the fair use law", but the practice of fair use is entrenced in common law.
Whew, that turned out to be longer than I thought.
Imagine if you would an opensource space transportation project . . . like openBSD, tightly moderated, but open to general contributions and willng to accept donations of hardware and cash.
Perhaps we'll give "kiddie" rides to finance it as well.
This sort of project is a natural for an open group effort, sort of junkyard wars gone "loony"
Hydrogen Oxygen rockets are well understood, as are flight control systems, vacuum canisters and all the other components that go into making this sort thing.
I think it is time that private people and or corporations realized the long term benefits of the utilization of space and got off their colletive duffuses and starting doing something real.
Of course, I could take my own advice . . . nah, I'm happiest sitting here in the dark.
Ah, but is blowing up a reactor akin to letting one go critical?
Answer: no.
If you take a nuclear bomb and blow it up using conventional explosives you spread the contents over a large area, about 2 lbs of uranium/plutonium. Which, while nasty, is not nearly as bad a setting off the same bomb as a nuclear device.
If we take a nuclear reactor, and blow it up like we did challenger, then we will spread the contents over a large area. How large and how much depend upon the altitude it goes wrong and what sort of reactor we eventually use.
The reactor is going to have to be pretty darn small to make this work, so we can only speculate at this point. But, if the reactor is smaller than the ones on Nuclear subs, then the amount of radioactive material being spread around is going to be small. I don't know how small, but perhaps grams rather than pounds.
Does anyone have any clue at all what would happen if the shuttle crashed into Miami?
Accident risk with a nuclear powered plasma rocket would be no greater at all.
As to damage potential, I don't believe the damage would be of any greater magnitude, it may be less, only the nature of the damage would be different.
Dropping a Nuclear Reactor into downtown (city of your choice) is not a good idea. But, it would be remedialble. And the overall damage for same lift capacity would be far less for sure.
My two cents.
Too right, and the truly scary part is that everything MS has touched they have enventually won exclusive domain over.
Of course, the other scary part is how few people actually get it. Even now, we have so little choice of product as to be meaningless. And, just ask Kodak how level the playing field is.
Lastly, I find it absolutely amazing how much hype there is over something that is still almost pure vapour ware.
Realy, the best choice is to expose it for what it is, and create something truly beautiful to perform the work we actually need.
END
Don't suppose you are from the Maritimes, eh?
In that case, go ahead, give some major public personallity a real good soak, just don't don't do it Canada, Jean dosen't like competition.
That's pretty much the point, isn't it? Wiretaps and email taps require judicial orders in most countries, I don't know about the US.
Illegal acts should be discovered, hopefully before they occur, and acted upon decisively.
I'm surprised you had no objection to illegally copying software, or making threats against a world leader.
Here's the point:
Public monitoring of public behaviour is perfectly acceptable. It should be! If choose to stand on a street corner and discuss illegal activities infront of a beat cop then you get what you deserve. Your privacy is yours to protect, or not. Your government and by extension its agents are tasked by you to protect your rights, whatever those are. Do you want them to not be able to watch for these actions? For my part, I fully support legal monitoring. I like being able to go to the corner store at 1am because I'm out of Cheeto's.
Don't worry, I don't mean any harm by reading all your email. I won't tell Microsoft that you gave your serial numbers to Fred. I won't tell Mr Dubya that you plan to "shave his un-american head and paint it with a bull's eye". I won't tell the Arizona Nuclear Power Plant that you plan to blow up their transmission lines to California. I won't tell the FBI that you are planning on moving those illegal fire arms into New York tonight.
Nope, I'll just listen.
Sincerly, NSA.
If you believe that have I got a deal for you . . .
I don't guess you've heard of openDoc then? openDoc is a document centric way of looking at data, rather than a process centric way. We would build a document that would contain those items we want, with out having to launch separate applications for each component. All the program aspects are transparent to the user. I want a table, I just pick a table. I want to extract data from a DB and place it inside my document I can do that without having to launch the DB. I want to display my document as a presentation, I just click on "presentation" and whamo! there it is.
IBM first introduced this amazing product into OS/2 with version 2.2. At that point they made openDoc fully integrated into the Presentation Manager. This meant that for apps that supported it, you could just drag the appropriate part of the document from one app to another. Formating was largely automatic. Very nice and very killer.
Unfortunately, IBM has become a slave to MicroSlob and well, you can see for yourself where OS/2 is.
KOffice is probably going to be a "nice" office collection, but it will be just another office app. Nothing special, unless . . .
It is a nice project and it does have application in the corporate world. Yes, I agree, it is a good. But . ..
what the open source world needs to push it over the "edge" is a project that everyone would want to have, a killer app if you would.
if, say, the open source world got together and built an openDoc office suite, then that would be worth talking about . . . 'til then, well, we'll see.
I'm going to submit a patent for the moon. That way when anyone looks at the moon I'll be able to collect royalties. I'll be nice, I promise, I'll charge only 1 cent canadian per look. Be nice to ding Bill Gates for a change . . . Maybe after a few years, I'll GPL it!
Actually, I haven't confused the two. I haven't evaluated Linux' quality, only its success in the market place.
I'm not saying that BSD is bad and Linux good, I am saying that BSD must make the market aware or die. That is the reality of the world, quality does not rise to surface by itself, it must be pushed weedled and dragged there.
Ah, BSD, looking back it is like looking into another world altogether. I remember other products from the same period that were "the best" and yet, those too are long gone.
History looks back not on the best, but on the survivor. Beta Video tapes, DAT Audio, Digital AM/FM Radio, all have been "the best" and all have simply died.
The causes are varied but they all share a common thread. Microsoft realized very early on that if you want to survive it matters not if you are the best, but rather that everyone recognizes that you are "it". Sony blew it with Beta because they did not allow general propegation of their standard. The VHS format was given away for free and adopted instantly by the pornography movement in the US and became the instant standard.
BSD never made themselves a public entity. Linux has fought tooth and nail to make themselves visible. Outside of the computer professional field I doubt if anyone has heard of BSD, free or not.
Unfortunately, it is the public's awarness that determines a products viability, and most importantly it is the public perception that a product is "used" that makes it indeed used.
Take voting in an election as a good example. People want most of all to vote for the winner. So, whether they understand, believe in, or agree with, a candidate is moot. They will vote for the candidate that they believe will win. MS was preceived as having "won" the OS wars way back in the late '80's, even though MacOS, OS/2 and others were far far ahead of Windows 3.0.
After reading 381 posts and a large protion of the "the act" I've come to one unmistakable conclusion:
to wit: Microsoft is copyright and trade mark of some large company in Redmond WA, and I don't see them complaining when I use that bit of copyright material without "express written consent".
Therefore, if this company, which is already in dutch with the D.O.J. (another copyright issue here), wishes the world to stop using its copyright material without consent, perhaps we should do so . . .
Ya! Right on. I'd say that you hit the nail right on the head here. If the software giants want to sell garbage that thrashes your system and then offer to take responsibility for their actions, well, let them get what they deserve.
However, I think I should point out that it therefore becomes incumbant upon us, the free software developers, to produce software that is "bug free". The GPL gives us a conveint out, but if war is to be won we have to make sure that our software can "do no harm".
Also, agreeable terms or not, one has to look upon this decision with some relief, after all, now you in the U.S. know with certainty that your software license is binding under law. We in Canada have yet to have our moment in the courts. I have a feeling that things could be very different here. After all, we have a law that states categorically that you are not allowed to sign away your right to sue, period. How this gets interpretted with regard to software license remains to be seen.
The point isn't that an SQL implimentation be only 100% ISO 92, but that it at least support 100% ISO compliance.
Extension are nice additions that add extra function and improve ease of use. We like extensions because they are what push the standard and lead us towards ISO2000.
When certain companies add extension, they have an execrable tendency to remove base compliance. MS SQL server does not support the base ISO 92 standard, nor does Oracle for that matter. Few companies do support the standard 100% but a notable few are DB/2 and mSQL.
However, the open doc standard was designed in an attempt to create a standard for document interchange that was not proprietory to one company. Like Java, there was a real chance that the lives of users could have been simplified greatly.
I support any standard that attempts to make computer use more tranparent for the average person. After all, isn't that what all of use developers want anyway? More happy users?
Your real question is not how stupid you could be suppling a Word97 doc to a Word95 office but rather will there ever be a universal data format?
The short answer is NO. It is not in the interests of Microsoft to support any standard that does directly lead to more money in their pockets. You can bet that their support of any standard will include massive proprietary changes.
SQL in MSQL is not SQL as written by ISO. Basic in Access Basic bears little or no resemblance to Basic. Java on microsoft isn't. FrontPage uses Exploder proprietary mark up tags that have nothing to do with HTML.
If you have to pay money for it, Microsoft will support it. If it prevents Microsoft from forcing you to buy a new version of Word every year, you can bet Microsoft won't support it. DOJ or not!
I think you finally got the point of the books. All the control that you think you have over your life is pure illusion. The rain god is perhaps the best example in all the books.
However, I think that the question still has to be:
Mr Adams, how did you feel as you wrote the Guide?
I'm sure that you were and still are deeply amused by all our attempts to exert control over our lives, but is that lighter moode not underlaid by a darker sense of, perhaps, sadness, or inevitablity?
Slashdot Mirror
This is a reasonable argument, but not clearly thought out, and it leads down a rather slippery sloap.
The distinction between what I said and what you've interpreted is very subtle indeed. I'm saying that because there are too many simple and sublte means of evading encryption laws aimed at making my on-line transactions LESS secure, that we should not pass such laws.
The LOSS is that we have a simple to break encryption standard in the US and Canada has the worlds most difficult to break encryption. Who gets the banking? Not the US. The economic downside of restricting encryption is too enourmous to even contemplate, IMO. And that is just one off the top of my head example.
I'm not even going to go into the issue of liberty. Every time you grant power to authority you can bet that authority will use that power to its utmost and just a bit beyond. Losing a freedom for some sense of security, particularly when that security is pure illusion, is a very poor trade.
Prohibition almost never works. And certainly not when you are prohibiting something that anyone with even a tiny bit of smarts can do on their own.
Cryptography does not even require computers, the ultimate encryption, one time pads, does not require a computer and is utterly secure as long as you maintain pad seccurity.
There are caveats to everything, oh well. Enforcing cryptographic limits on your citizens is of no value at all. If a criminal wishes to transact their business using encryption technology then there is nothing law enforcement can do about it. Period.
Only deep ignorance prevents these people from seeing the truth.
Besides embedding your message in an image, there are dozens upon dozens of ways of passing messages in plain text. Some famous examples from the past use poetry.
Enough for now, I might go off on real rant, then we'd all be unhappy.
Depends on exactly where it is that he gets sent. The "detention" centre near where I live uses the "detainees" as labour to keep the 160 acre centre looking like a park. They maintain the gardens, fences, fields and forests in pristine park like conditions.
They are given the full provincial standard education. No skipping, no slacking.
I don't know if they learn anything or not. I guess that's up to them.
It certainly isn't something that this young fellow is going to enjoy.
The recidivism rate in Canada, last I checked, for these centres is less than 1/3.
What bothers me the most about all these sort of reviews is the claim that 2.5 hours of battery time is "right up there".
It's not. I assure you. Running my Apple PowerBook with a MachBSD on it, I can easily run 4 hours on a single charge, no problem. In fact, I have often forgotten my charger at home and managed to eek out the entire day at work, about 6 hours. But that is REALLY pushing it.
Typically, when using Mac OS 9.1, I can get 4 hours, with no problem. So, how does 2 hours compare to that?
And, if you want a stable full featured Linux in a Notebook, get one of ther Macintosh Linux distro's. Or, perhaps get a serious business oriented OS, like openBSD.
You don't even need to go the full PowerBook route, you can use an iBook and get the same performance in a sub $2000cdn package.
And lastly, if I pop 2 batteries in, I can easily run 10 hours on a single charge. Enough to do an entire week long mountain expidtion, reviewing the days photos and saving them to a SuperDisk.
PS How the hell are my posts rated at 0 even when when i amlogged in? /., that's how . . .
BTW: you're right as well, and your message should be at least a 2, however, all is not fair in /. and love.
8^)
it is called "fair use" and while it is not "law" it is common law. That is to say, I don't believe that there is a formal law passed by congress called "the fair use law", but the practice of fair use is entrenced in common law.
Whew, that turned out to be longer than I thought.
Imagine if you would an opensource space transportation project . . . like openBSD, tightly moderated, but open to general contributions and willng to accept donations of hardware and cash.
Perhaps we'll give "kiddie" rides to finance it as well.
This sort of project is a natural for an open group effort, sort of junkyard wars gone "loony"
Hydrogen Oxygen rockets are well understood, as are flight control systems, vacuum canisters and all the other components that go into making this sort thing.
I think it is time that private people and or corporations realized the long term benefits of the utilization of space and got off their colletive duffuses and starting doing something real.
Of course, I could take my own advice . . . nah, I'm happiest sitting here in the dark.
Ah, but is blowing up a reactor akin to letting one go critical?
Answer: no.
If you take a nuclear bomb and blow it up using conventional explosives you spread the contents over a large area, about 2 lbs of uranium/plutonium. Which, while nasty, is not nearly as bad a setting off the same bomb as a nuclear device.
If we take a nuclear reactor, and blow it up like we did challenger, then we will spread the contents over a large area. How large and how much depend upon the altitude it goes wrong and what sort of reactor we eventually use.
The reactor is going to have to be pretty darn small to make this work, so we can only speculate at this point. But, if the reactor is smaller than the ones on Nuclear subs, then the amount of radioactive material being spread around is going to be small. I don't know how small, but perhaps grams rather than pounds.
Does anyone have any clue at all what would happen if the shuttle crashed into Miami?
Accident risk with a nuclear powered plasma rocket would be no greater at all.
As to damage potential, I don't believe the damage would be of any greater magnitude, it may be less, only the nature of the damage would be different.
Dropping a Nuclear Reactor into downtown (city of your choice) is not a good idea. But, it would be remedialble. And the overall damage for same lift capacity would be far less for sure.
My two cents.
Too right, and the truly scary part is that everything MS has touched they have enventually won exclusive domain over.
Of course, the other scary part is how few people actually get it. Even now, we have so little choice of product as to be meaningless. And, just ask Kodak how level the playing field is.
Lastly, I find it absolutely amazing how much hype there is over something that is still almost pure vapour ware.
Realy, the best choice is to expose it for what it is, and create something truly beautiful to perform the work we actually need.
END
Don't suppose you are from the Maritimes, eh? In that case, go ahead, give some major public personallity a real good soak, just don't don't do it Canada, Jean dosen't like competition.
That's pretty much the point, isn't it? Wiretaps and email taps require judicial orders in most countries, I don't know about the US.
Illegal acts should be discovered, hopefully before they occur, and acted upon decisively.
I'm surprised you had no objection to illegally copying software, or making threats against a world leader.
Here's the point:
Public monitoring of public behaviour is perfectly acceptable. It should be! If choose to stand on a street corner and discuss illegal activities infront of a beat cop then you get what you deserve. Your privacy is yours to protect, or not. Your government and by extension its agents are tasked by you to protect your rights, whatever those are. Do you want them to not be able to watch for these actions? For my part, I fully support legal monitoring. I like being able to go to the corner store at 1am because I'm out of Cheeto's.
Sincerly, NSA.
If you believe that have I got a deal for you . . .
KParts . . . I'm having a closer look now. Thanks.
IBM first introduced this amazing product into OS/2 with version 2.2. At that point they made openDoc fully integrated into the Presentation Manager. This meant that for apps that supported it, you could just drag the appropriate part of the document from one app to another. Formating was largely automatic. Very nice and very killer.
Unfortunately, IBM has become a slave to MicroSlob and well, you can see for yourself where OS/2 is.
KOffice is probably going to be a "nice" office collection, but it will be just another office app. Nothing special, unless . . .
BTW: I don't do C++, I do objective C.
It is a nice project and it does have application in the corporate world. Yes, I agree, it is a good. But . . .
what the open source world needs to push it over the "edge" is a project that everyone would want to have, a killer app if you would.
if, say, the open source world got together and built an openDoc office suite, then that would be worth talking about . . . 'til then, well, we'll see.
I'm going to submit a patent for the moon. That way when anyone looks at the moon I'll be able to collect royalties. I'll be nice, I promise, I'll charge only 1 cent canadian per look. Be nice to ding Bill Gates for a change . . .
Maybe after a few years, I'll GPL it!
Actually, I haven't confused the two. I haven't evaluated Linux' quality, only its success in the market place.
I'm not saying that BSD is bad and Linux good, I am saying that BSD must make the market aware or die. That is the reality of the world, quality does not rise to surface by itself, it must be pushed weedled and dragged there.
Ah, BSD, looking back it is like looking into another world altogether. I remember other products from the same period that were "the best" and yet, those too are long gone.
History looks back not on the best, but on the survivor. Beta Video tapes, DAT Audio, Digital AM/FM Radio, all have been "the best" and all have simply died.
The causes are varied but they all share a common thread. Microsoft realized very early on that if you want to survive it matters not if you are the best, but rather that everyone recognizes that you are "it". Sony blew it with Beta because they did not allow general propegation of their standard. The VHS format was given away for free and adopted instantly by the pornography movement in the US and became the instant standard.
BSD never made themselves a public entity. Linux has fought tooth and nail to make themselves visible. Outside of the computer professional field I doubt if anyone has heard of BSD, free or not.
Unfortunately, it is the public's awarness that determines a products viability, and most importantly it is the public perception that a product is "used" that makes it indeed used.
Take voting in an election as a good example. People want most of all to vote for the winner. So, whether they understand, believe in, or agree with, a candidate is moot. They will vote for the candidate that they believe will win. MS was preceived as having "won" the OS wars way back in the late '80's, even though MacOS, OS/2 and others were far far ahead of Windows 3.0.
In Summary: Publicity Pays, big time
to wit: Microsoft is copyright and trade mark of some large company in Redmond WA, and I don't see them complaining when I use that bit of copyright material without "express written consent".
Therefore, if this company, which is already in dutch with the D.O.J. (another copyright issue here), wishes the world to stop using its copyright material without consent, perhaps we should do so . . .
Now, if you want to see the media to use the terms correctly, then it seems to me that a letter writing campaign is in order.
Everytime some hack hacks out a story using hacker instead of cracker, write them a letter, preferably by email.
eventually they will cave . . .IMHO
However, I think I should point out that it therefore becomes incumbant upon us, the free software developers, to produce software that is "bug free". The GPL gives us a conveint out, but if war is to be won we have to make sure that our software can "do no harm".
Also, agreeable terms or not, one has to look upon this decision with some relief, after all, now you in the U.S. know with certainty that your software license is binding under law. We in Canada have yet to have our moment in the courts. I have a feeling that things could be very different here. After all, we have a law that states categorically that you are not allowed to sign away your right to sue, period. How this gets interpretted with regard to software license remains to be seen.
The point isn't that an SQL implimentation be only 100% ISO 92, but that it at least support 100% ISO compliance.
Extension are nice additions that add extra function and improve ease of use. We like extensions because they are what push the standard and lead us towards ISO2000.
When certain companies add extension, they have an execrable tendency to remove base compliance. MS SQL server does not support the base ISO 92 standard, nor does Oracle for that matter. Few companies do support the standard 100% but a notable few are DB/2 and mSQL.
However, the open doc standard was designed in an attempt to create a standard for document interchange that was not proprietory to one company. Like Java, there was a real chance that the lives of users could have been simplified greatly.
I support any standard that attempts to make computer use more tranparent for the average person. After all, isn't that what all of use developers want anyway? More happy users?
Your real question is not how stupid you could be suppling a Word97 doc to a Word95 office but rather will there ever be a universal data format?
The short answer is NO. It is not in the interests of Microsoft to support any standard that does directly lead to more money in their pockets. You can bet that their support of any standard will include massive proprietary changes.
SQL in MSQL is not SQL as written by ISO.
Basic in Access Basic bears little or no resemblance to Basic.
Java on microsoft isn't.
FrontPage uses Exploder proprietary mark up tags that have nothing to do with HTML.
If you have to pay money for it, Microsoft will support it. If it prevents Microsoft from forcing you to buy a new version of Word every year, you can bet Microsoft won't support it. DOJ or not!
However, I think that the question still has to be:
Mr Adams, how did you feel as you wrote the Guide?
I'm sure that you were and still are deeply amused by all our attempts to exert control over our lives, but is that lighter moode not underlaid by a darker sense of, perhaps, sadness, or inevitablity?