remember how Microsoft took the generic computer word "windows" and stole it and turned it into a trademark that you can't use without their permission?
well,.net is a common TLD, but they're stealing it now every time the proprietary usage virus propagates to a new person.
I wasn't paying much attention when i read it, but I thought you meant "Yahoo is run my rumors" and all I could think was, "no, Slashdot is run rumors!". Errata, too, are ruminant.
at the risk of starting a licensing flame war, what license do you think they'll use when they release this? GPL? BSD? Or will it be a regular old patent-with-royalty sort of thing?
Nowadays, it only makes sense for educational institutions to start making money
off of their programs....It may be going off on a rant, but it's time that we take money from the military
and start giving it to the school systems...
you are going off on a rant. The problem here is not how much money universities need or get, the problem is if the fruits of research are proprietary and locked up, they will benefit society much less. There would be no internet today if it had been proprietary. Sure, we'd have instant phone messaging... whooo hooo!
the right way to track forwards is to dummy up the distribution list and actually
send everybody an ever-so-slightly-different version of the document. People could discuss and
and compare notes and share opinions never knowing that if they forward a copy and it gets published that it'll be identifiable as the one they got.
mod this parent random piece of opinion down at least a notch! we all know that there are hoaxes out there, no news in that. But we need info or analysis, not pure speculation, speculation that could just as easily be disinformation itself.
The piece reads as completely legit to me, though perhaps a tad too "gee-whiz". It is absolutely Microsoft's M.O. to pump customers and partners with questions: why do you want to do that? what's that for? what are your plans? It's brilliant on their part and absolutely stupid for anybody to give them such information: why educate your monopolist on how important different features are to your bottom line?
Instead, turn every question back to them with something like, "wait, are you saying you don't plan to support that?" or suggest things that talk more about them than you like "we're evaluating technologies where the specs are open and don't change because we're tired of buying proprietary solutions with planned obsolescence"
From the website, The operation is very reliable and immune to interference.
um... immune to interference? So, you've got a link going to the divorcee down the block and the two of you are getting naked on-cam, and the blinds are open (of necessity) and you don't think the little crowd of neighborhood kids at your window is going to interfere?
with mozilla, click on the little piece
of window frame between the preview window
and the list of headers. it even has some
decorations on it to show you where to click.
same for netscape mail, and the same whether on windows or linux
The GNU tools are cool... and they're free... but they were originally
released precisely to be run on non-free versions of Unix.
Yes, yes, no.
yes yes and yes, as in, you are wrong.
I said "released", not "written". The goal may have been a completely free unix, but the tools were released well before this dream was realized. One can only conclude that they were released precisely for the proprietary unices that were available at the time they were released.
An argument could be made that X is part of the OS, but Gnome isn't even X. Gnome is a tool like the rest of GNU, and it was created to combat the non-freeness of KDE's library dependencies. It might be part of a strategy to acheive the larger dream, but still, it is intended to run on non-free platforms in the present. To state otherwise is to state a change.
In all of this, RMS has been a constant - he promotes Free Software.
It is
simply amazing how many people want to use GNOME
together with Mac OSX, and yet in Stallman's view, this would
be an example of GNOME falling short of its goals.
I defend RMS more than I bash him. however, in this case [if the other statement I quoted is true] he is not being constant-consistent
The GNU tools are cool... and they're free... but they were originally released precisely to be run on non-free versions of Unix. and so it should be with GNOME. It should kill all non-free fat desktops (I run a slim desktop myself) and if it does it has succeeded.
That it might also promote free software in general is good, but it should not be a slave to that task... unless the plan has changed and RMS thinks Mazaar e-nonFree is about to fall, but that is not a constant, that is a change.
Throughout the patent, references are made to "keyed digital data", but it never
mentions mice
sorry, but tell me again, what do you call the right and left keys on the little rolling palm-sized keyboard in your right hand? No, I don't mean the huge 102-key stationary qwerty mouse in front of you, I mean the rolling (portable!) keyboard that sits on the little rubbery keyboard-pad off to the right.
1. package managers should make it easy to move things around. I should be able to install the latest perl-xxx.rpm in a test location, test my scripts against it, and then reinstall it in the canonical place.
2. this needs to include all the files in/etc so app installers need to support flexible package management. Also note, the #!/shebang is totally broken in this sort of environment.
3. "the canonical places" (/usr,/etc, etc.:) should be a family of canonical places. The sysadmin group might not want to upgrade their perl scripts at the same time as the dbadmin group. decoupling their interdependency will lead to much more flexibility and quicker overall upgrading.
4. we can achieve this best if / is no longer / but is instead/root so there could be a/root1 and/root2 . Think of this, one file system containing two different distros that don't wrassle with one another.
do not evaluate this on whether you think it's a good idea. the point is that software allows soft parameterization, reentrency, soft configuration, etc. So, why can't we have it? Programmers need to stop hard coding shit, binding locations to one place.
I'd love to upgrade my workstation from RedHat 7.1 to RedHat 7.2 by installing onto the same partition without trashing the old. Then, over the course of the week I could work out the kinks and delete the old, knowing that at any time I could reboot the old to send a fax or whatever.
There are 1000s of corporate uses for this type of environment too... how many times have you heard "we're taking the mailserver down to upgrade it overnight" and then heard "um... it didn't come back up..."
did you mean Lazard Freres ("Lazard Brothers" in French)? They are a huge, rich "wall street" firm. They wouldn't even notice spending $20K so their SAs could run Linux on company laptops to dialup and fix shit from whereever. They also invest in scads of companies, big to small, and some portfolio company might also need this technology.
Who cares, they said they'd GPL it.
some of these precautions make sense in the short run, but in the longer run the terrorists will compensate. anybody as prepared as the Sept 11 hijackers will rent their own booth and will be bring in all the gear they need.
somebody on the radio pointed out that as we get better and better at stopping individual acts, the response is for a smaller number of more dedicated enemy to plan more thoroughly. So, for example, the number of hijackings has long been on the decline, but the number of people killed in each hijacking has gone way up.
anyway, in the particular case of hi-tech and shows like comdex, having the toys banned kinda takes the wind out of the whole affair.
when I learned computer science--which I admit was a long time ago, but that means the "gurus" have all had plenty of time to catch up--they taught us that if you obeyed the principles of modularity that you could have more than one implementation of something and use what was appropriate for the particulars of a given situation....
...so why does linux have 1 VM? it seems that 2 of them exist, and the BSD's have more... guys, "gimme a hunk" and "page fault" aren't exactly rocket science anymore, particularly with hardware support... the fact that there is room to make a big deal out of this is the problem, not the VMs.
high market capitalization, high price earnings ratio, high return on equity, etc., these things all come from growth opportunities, and not from already profitable product lines.
Linux's growth in the server market, an area that Microsoft has long targeted, comes very much at the expense of Microsoft. It tears at the heart of Microsoft's future strategy.
Microsoft is already a monopoly on the desktop, and all they are left with is clinging to that with challenges from all sides.
Bugzilla is way too involved for public use. If I'm going to stick a toe in the water, I want my first interaction to be very simple, and rewarding. And [hint] everybody feels this way about new things.
Bugzilla has a million fields to fill out. Wanna know why the major search engines are so popular? one text box to fill, press Submit and voila, you might have your answer right there. Wanna know why email is so popular: To, Subject, Body, and then From defaults itself. And half the time, I can't even think of a Subject. Bugzilla needs to be this easy, or I and thousands of others will not use it [don't blame the messenger]. I don't know if my thought is already in the database, so I'll be damned if I'm going to fill out forms all day.
And if something does seem important enough for me to put in, I recall being asked a bunch of precious little questions where I was supposed to qualify, characterize, topicalize, and quantify on scales that seemed entirely random. At least, they should put in a "cowboyneal" choice.
The district court has ordered Zuccarini to take his sites offline, the FTC said,
while the case continues. But as of early Monday afternoon, at least one site
registered to Zuccarini, Annakurnikova.com, was still functional.
Hey, give the guy a break, he's trying. He closes down most of his sites, but whenever he hits the "back" button they all start up again. Those damn javascript-based admin tools...
Simple example: Outlawing red ink makes it easier to identify who is using red ink, but it
won't stop people from writing things down.
this discussion is about something much more substantive than the color of ink, and your example is stupid. Either you are stupid too, or you are being disrespectful of me for making me go through the whole description again to get you focused back on the serious subject at hand. ordinarily I would ignore you but I'm afraid that someone else might read this and think that you made a good point.
if red ink is necessary for terrorists and only nice to have for everyone else, then making it illegal would be a good way of focusing attention on terrorism. if there were a form of red ink that had a back-door that authorities can use to tell the difference, then even legitimate users could use it for everything but hiding info from the government.
I'm not advocating making encryption illegal (and that's a shorthand for backdoorless-encryption, right?). I'm pointing out that the people in favor of it are making a strong argument, and people like you are making a stupid counterargument.
I think what he means, is that regulation of inanimate objects doesn't nearly go all the way toward stopping the people that actually carry out these acts of terrorism.
no it doesn't, but outlawing encryption does make it easier to identify who is using encryption and that's a huge step toward reducing the population of people who need looking at.
... i.e. the policy accomplishes the goal that you and this guy seem to be endorsing, narrowing down and identifying and focusing on the potential terrorists.
and what else we've gained is the location of a much smaller population of people who are making phones calls that appear to deserve an extra look precisely because they won't play ball on encrytion.
That's not nothing. In fact, it's a lot. Without advocating for that side, they are making a much stronger argument then you are.
Prohibition (capital P, of alcohol) didn't work because a lot of people wanted to buy booze. If equally large numbers use encryption, you're right, that particular prohibition wouldn't work either. But I'll bet majorities want to simultaneously expose terrorism and engage in legal banking in the US and this prohibition will not fail.
I need to hear a stronger argument from your side.
draconian refers to harsh punishment, not intrusiveness.
Well, I will be sending a lot of encrypted mail... So there.
I understand the principle that you are defending, I do. Let's see if you can understand anyone else's point of view.
Let's say as a hypothetical that the terrorists who planned this attack actually took advantage of that flood-Echelon day a few months back, and without the flood they would have been unable to make their plan. Knowing what you know now (including that hypothetical "fact"), would you advocate another series of floods in the upcoming weeks and months? Is this principle of yours that strong? Because the people who want to stop terrorism have equally strong principles and they would have no qualms about stopping you. They have many ways to make your life miserable: remember, highly principled people often seem like pricks.
I'm not on a side here, but I want to be. Tell me why I should support your side over theirs.
you misunderstood what I meant so you didn't respond on point (sorry if I did not make it clear):
if encryption with no back door were made illegal, and Carnivore is monitoring email, then if Carnivore found un-decryptable encryption, Carnivore could flag that person as breaking the law.
You are right, it does not mean that the FBI would then know what was in that email, but the FBI would know who to talk to and would have legal grounds for demanding answers in the US (and potentially other nations). Furthermore, with the vast majority of law-abiding citizens using "legal" encryption, the FBI/CIA/NSA would have information about a much smaller population to monitor more closely.
Slashdot prides itself on being "smart": why do I have to lead you guys through this stuff by the hand? I'm not advocating these anti-encryption laws, BTW, but I would like to hear a cogent argument against them, because it looks to me like they have a good rationale.
Slashdot Mirror
well, .net is a common TLD, but they're stealing it now every time the proprietary usage virus propagates to a new person.
I wasn't paying much attention when i read it, but I thought you meant "Yahoo is run my rumors" and all I could think was, "no, Slashdot is run rumors!". Errata, too, are ruminant.
how did Cowboy Neal do?
Think really hard...
you are going off on a rant. The problem here is not how much money universities need or get, the problem is if the fruits of research are proprietary and locked up, they will benefit society much less. There would be no internet today if it had been proprietary. Sure, we'd have instant phone messaging... whooo hooo!
the right way to track forwards is to dummy up the distribution list and actually send everybody an ever-so-slightly-different version of the document. People could discuss and and compare notes and share opinions never knowing that if they forward a copy and it gets published that it'll be identifiable as the one they got.
The piece reads as completely legit to me, though perhaps a tad too "gee-whiz". It is absolutely Microsoft's M.O. to pump customers and partners with questions: why do you want to do that? what's that for? what are your plans? It's brilliant on their part and absolutely stupid for anybody to give them such information: why educate your monopolist on how important different features are to your bottom line? Instead, turn every question back to them with something like, "wait, are you saying you don't plan to support that?" or suggest things that talk more about them than you like "we're evaluating technologies where the specs are open and don't change because we're tired of buying proprietary solutions with planned obsolescence"
um... immune to interference? So, you've got a link going to the divorcee down the block and the two of you are getting naked on-cam, and the blinds are open (of necessity) and you don't think the little crowd of neighborhood kids at your window is going to interfere?
same for netscape mail, and the same whether on windows or linux
yes yes and yes, as in, you are wrong.
I said "released", not "written". The goal may have been a completely free unix, but the tools were released well before this dream was realized. One can only conclude that they were released precisely for the proprietary unices that were available at the time they were released.
An argument could be made that X is part of the OS, but Gnome isn't even X. Gnome is a tool like the rest of GNU, and it was created to combat the non-freeness of KDE's library dependencies. It might be part of a strategy to acheive the larger dream, but still, it is intended to run on non-free platforms in the present. To state otherwise is to state a change.
It is simply amazing how many people want to use GNOME together with Mac OSX, and yet in Stallman's view, this would be an example of GNOME falling short of its goals.
I defend RMS more than I bash him. however, in this case [if the other statement I quoted is true] he is not being constant-consistent
The GNU tools are cool... and they're free... but they were originally released precisely to be run on non-free versions of Unix. and so it should be with GNOME. It should kill all non-free fat desktops (I run a slim desktop myself) and if it does it has succeeded.
That it might also promote free software in general is good, but it should not be a slave to that task... unless the plan has changed and RMS thinks Mazaar e-nonFree is about to fall, but that is not a constant, that is a change.
sorry, but tell me again, what do you call the right and left keys on the little rolling palm-sized keyboard in your right hand? No, I don't mean the huge 102-key stationary qwerty mouse in front of you, I mean the rolling (portable!) keyboard that sits on the little rubbery keyboard-pad off to the right.
nuff said?
2. this needs to include all the files in /etc so app installers need to support flexible package management. Also note, the #!/shebang is totally broken in this sort of environment.
3. "the canonical places" (/usr, /etc, etc. :) should be a family of canonical places. The sysadmin group might not want to upgrade their perl scripts at the same time as the dbadmin group. decoupling their interdependency will lead to much more flexibility and quicker overall upgrading.
4. we can achieve this best if / is no longer / but is instead /root so there could be a /root1 and /root2 . Think of this, one file system containing two different distros that don't wrassle with one another.
do not evaluate this on whether you think it's a good idea. the point is that software allows soft parameterization, reentrency, soft configuration, etc. So, why can't we have it? Programmers need to stop hard coding shit, binding locations to one place.
I'd love to upgrade my workstation from RedHat 7.1 to RedHat 7.2 by installing onto the same partition without trashing the old. Then, over the course of the week I could work out the kinks and delete the old, knowing that at any time I could reboot the old to send a fax or whatever. There are 1000s of corporate uses for this type of environment too... how many times have you heard "we're taking the mailserver down to upgrade it overnight" and then heard "um... it didn't come back up..."
did you mean Lazard Freres ("Lazard Brothers" in French)? They are a huge, rich "wall street" firm. They wouldn't even notice spending $20K so their SAs could run Linux on company laptops to dialup and fix shit from whereever. They also invest in scads of companies, big to small, and some portfolio company might also need this technology. Who cares, they said they'd GPL it.
somebody on the radio pointed out that as we get better and better at stopping individual acts, the response is for a smaller number of more dedicated enemy to plan more thoroughly. So, for example, the number of hijackings has long been on the decline, but the number of people killed in each hijacking has gone way up.
anyway, in the particular case of hi-tech and shows like comdex, having the toys banned kinda takes the wind out of the whole affair.
...so why does linux have 1 VM? it seems that 2 of them exist, and the BSD's have more... guys, "gimme a hunk" and "page fault" aren't exactly rocket science anymore, particularly with hardware support... the fact that there is room to make a big deal out of this is the problem, not the VMs.
Microsoft is already a monopoly on the desktop, and all they are left with is clinging to that with challenges from all sides.
Bugzilla is way too involved for public use. If I'm going to stick a toe in the water, I want my first interaction to be very simple, and rewarding. And [hint] everybody feels this way about new things.
And if something does seem important enough for me to put in, I recall being asked a bunch of precious little questions where I was supposed to qualify, characterize, topicalize, and quantify on scales that seemed entirely random. At least, they should put in a "cowboyneal" choice.
Hey, give the guy a break, he's trying. He closes down most of his sites, but whenever he hits the "back" button they all start up again. Those damn javascript-based admin tools...
won't stop people from writing things down.
this discussion is about something much more substantive than the color of ink, and your example is stupid. Either you are stupid too, or you are being disrespectful of me for making me go through the whole description again to get you focused back on the serious subject at hand. ordinarily I would ignore you but I'm afraid that someone else might read this and think that you made a good point.
if red ink is necessary for terrorists and only nice to have for everyone else, then making it illegal would be a good way of focusing attention on terrorism. if there were a form of red ink that had a back-door that authorities can use to tell the difference, then even legitimate users could use it for everything but hiding info from the government.
I'm not advocating making encryption illegal (and that's a shorthand for backdoorless-encryption, right?). I'm pointing out that the people in favor of it are making a strong argument, and people like you are making a stupid counterargument.
no it doesn't, but outlawing encryption does make it easier to identify who is using encryption and that's a huge step toward reducing the population of people who need looking at.
... i.e. the policy accomplishes the goal that you and this guy seem to be endorsing, narrowing down and identifying and focusing on the potential terrorists.
and what else we've gained is the location of a much smaller population of people who are making phones calls that appear to deserve an extra look precisely because they won't play ball on encrytion.
That's not nothing. In fact, it's a lot. Without advocating for that side, they are making a much stronger argument then you are.
Prohibition (capital P, of alcohol) didn't work because a lot of people wanted to buy booze. If equally large numbers use encryption, you're right, that particular prohibition wouldn't work either. But I'll bet majorities want to simultaneously expose terrorism and engage in legal banking in the US and this prohibition will not fail.
I need to hear a stronger argument from your side.
well thank God they're in charge and not the guy who started this thread 'cuz they make more sense.
draconian refers to harsh punishment, not intrusiveness.
Well, I will be sending a lot of encrypted mail... So there.
I understand the principle that you are defending, I do. Let's see if you can understand anyone else's point of view.
Let's say as a hypothetical that the terrorists who planned this attack actually took advantage of that flood-Echelon day a few months back, and without the flood they would have been unable to make their plan. Knowing what you know now (including that hypothetical "fact"), would you advocate another series of floods in the upcoming weeks and months? Is this principle of yours that strong? Because the people who want to stop terrorism have equally strong principles and they would have no qualms about stopping you. They have many ways to make your life miserable: remember, highly principled people often seem like pricks.
I'm not on a side here, but I want to be. Tell me why I should support your side over theirs.
if encryption with no back door were made illegal, and Carnivore is monitoring email, then if Carnivore found un-decryptable encryption, Carnivore could flag that person as breaking the law.
You are right, it does not mean that the FBI would then know what was in that email, but the FBI would know who to talk to and would have legal grounds for demanding answers in the US (and potentially other nations). Furthermore, with the vast majority of law-abiding citizens using "legal" encryption, the FBI/CIA/NSA would have information about a much smaller population to monitor more closely.
Slashdot prides itself on being "smart": why do I have to lead you guys through this stuff by the hand? I'm not advocating these anti-encryption laws, BTW, but I would like to hear a cogent argument against them, because it looks to me like they have a good rationale.