open source software is more secure and less likely to contain marketing trojans, trap doors and the other privacy violating sniffers proprietary software always seems to contain
the belief that laws are unjust which seek to create an artificial right of ownership of information is completely consistent with the goals of the various types of open source: information wants to be free. I'd rather have Kraftwerks MIDI files than an MP3; I'd rather have source than binary. duh.
Re:Everything You Need to Know, You Learned in Kdg
on
IANAL
·
· Score: 2
Unfortunately, these days, the parents then go and fuck it all up
false. "these days" parents produce remarkably well adjusted children. in past generations children were treated in a way wed consider abusive today.
I'd argue that the company hasn't changed so much over those twelve months to hit such a range.
huh? the company doesn't have to change at all. If you opened a lemonade stand the year an ice age unexpectedly arrived in the summer, you'd lose money. it doesn't matter how perfectly you executed your plan, and it doesn't matter how good an idea it was and how unlikely it was that an ice age would come.
that's the finesse way to solve this; there is also the brute force way: if everybody on distributed.net pays a little bit of the fine, it'll be paid off in n(log(N)) time
misconceptions about the electoral college
on
Hemos The Iron Chef
·
· Score: 3
as a history major, I find this election gratifying because I get to display my fine grasp of minutiae..."
Oh yeah? Well, why then the persistently wrong-headed bringing up mention of Gore's winning the "popular vote" as if it makes any difference at all. In the US, you get elected via the electoral college. It is not a "proxy" for the popular vote, and it is not an archaic throwback to a bygone era. It is the deal, the whole deal.
The history is, we didn't have a country: there were 13 colonies, and in order to get them to agree to form a country, a deal was struck. We have to live with the deal because it would be unfair not to. Just like Slashdot made a deal with Andover, the colonies made a deal with each other. At one time, the popular vote did not include women and slaves, and today it does not include children, though children are included in the size of the electoral college delegations (hmmm... maybe the E.C. is more representative?) Yes, smaller states get a disproportionate clout in the vote, just as the Slashdot editors get disproportionate clout (comparative to IQ and sophistication) on Slashdot. So quit bringing up the popular vote as if it matters, it doesn't.
And, even if it it does matter in a "my father can beat up your father" way, a smart person will also realize that the campaigns are run toward winning the electoral vote. If the popular vote mattered to the outcome, we'd see different campaigns and likely see a different apportioning. It's unscientific to use today's measure of the popular vote as a proxy for the national will.
I'm not saying there is no privacy issue: of course there is. But there is also the issue of public funding and retrospective public accountability, an which you are ignoring. The purpose of accountability is not negative. Looking at the records, should we be funding internet access at a higher level because it's so important, or at a lower level because the funds could provide better education if spent in a different area?
The Nader inspired Freedom of Information Act cuts both ways.
I hope your not indirectly implying Linux's track record is any better?
Why do you hope he's not? Linux track record is better on this score. This security hole is a designed-in flaw in Windows. While all software has the potential to have bugs which cause security risks, the particular problem of launching emailed trojans or viruses is a Windows problem. Unix and Unix MTAs do not launch attachments. The user would be forced to save them to disk and manually make them executable.
Re:Linux is not an OS, either...
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 2
Trying to call it GNU/Linux... yeah, and especially when they don't themselves call say GNU/Hurd!
the only fair thing to do is to include only the most distinctive name, which is that of the kernel, Linux.
linguistically speaking, there is something else going on: things are not named out of "fairness" (cf. mankind includes women... heck, the word woman contains the word man) but by convention. There doesn't need to be a reason to call something by a name, just a need that communities agree on names, which in this case has been agreed to be "linux".
Re:Haven't I seen this before?
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
An OS is, and should be, what a computer needs to work.
you already know this, so forgive the "correction", but that's too broad. The definition of an OS must include that it's a platform for other software, be it applications, client/server, whatever. An app written directly
on top of a chip is not an OS. According to this way of looking at it, an OS may include Internet and/or Pantone "support" as a feature, but neither is necessary for some other OS.
arguments from authority... on Slashdot...don't get you much.
bullshit. Slashdot is positively sycophantic about big-name figures from all sorts of fields. What set me off was you telling me where I'd find enlightenment, so I figured I enlighten you about me, FWIW. Wouldn't you rather hear about finance from a person who's studied it? I would. So why didn't I explain everything in gory detail originally? Because it takes a lot of time. Do I have time now? No. So why am I explaining? I like to show off.
Anyhow, I'll grant some investing isn't gambling, and that part does indeed have to do with productivity.
The difference between our positions on this point is a subtle one. When I say "invest" I am referring to what the recipient of the investment does with the money, rather than the motivations of the person who makes the investment. "My" way is a little more in keeping with accounting terminology. You are saying that some people approach stock market purchases as a gamble. I'm saying there is a better way, one that bears in mind the "investment" nature of the underlying companies.
And I'm sure you'd grant that if we were all-knowing and infinitely
smart, then we would all agree on the price of a share, a price that took into account all future creation of value...If this were true, stocks would never change hands
Actually, not true. You are thinking of stock prices as expected values, but they are not. They must include the very same risk premiums that you accused me of neglecting. However, the other part of risk you don't quite grasp is that risk itself and risk premiums are based on the the investor's tolerance for particular sets of stochastic events, and to risk itself. How can this be? If I were to invest in cattle futures, I'd be diversifying my portfolio, likely decreasing my overall risk. If a cattleman were to, he'd be concentrating more assets in cattle, increasing his overall risk. In that scenario, I'd rationally be willing to pay more than he would for the very same assets, ergo, trade! Conditions change, though, and risks and returns too, so the appropriate portfolio for me one day is not necessarily the appropriate one the next day... and more trading ensues. BTW, the cattle example I gave is why the market does not reward diversifiable risk: it is avoidable. So, cattle futures may be highly risky by themselves, but they decrease overall risk in a balanced portfolio, and selling cattle short absolutely reduces risk for someone who owns cattle which is why cattle futures exist in the first place. Consider: farmer needs dough now, McDonald's wishes to guarantee cattle for later, and the two parties enter into a "risky" deal that decreased both of their risk.
He believed that other
investors were undervaluing Linux companies, and that he could therefore clean up by betting on them. Some days
you're right...
Even if he was absolutely 100% correct that those shares were undervalued, because the market does not reward diversifiable risk, concentrating too much of a portfolio in one thing is wrong, every single day.
...some days you're wrong. On the good days, you win the money of people having bad days.
Nope. That investment strategy can be characterized as "on the good days you walk away with the same returns as smarter people who took fewer risks, and on the bad days you walk away with less money than smarter people who still took fewer risks."
So as I said, the average investor can only make average rates of return. To beat the average, you need to have a leg
up on some other investor, whose loss is your gain.
This is the wrongness I was trying to correct in the first place. The market is not zero sum. Every day, everyone can win because the underlying assets are creating value everyday. In order to win you need to avoid needless risk. After that, there is no "average" return. There is any level of return you want, subject to risk.
A reasonable person might now ask, "Well, Mr. Smarty, if that's true then it shouldn't matter at all where I put my
money, huh? As long as it's not buried in a jar in my back yard, I'll make that same average return whether I put it in
stocks or bonds or CDs, right?"
By now, you perhaps understand why this and the remainder of what you said is more false than true?
The risk premium that you speak of as the reward for risk is maximized only to a fully diversified portfolio, or an approximation. Repeated trading is necessary to keep an portfolio diverse, for example so as not to miss out on the internet, new pharmaceuticals, etc. BTW, adjusting the overall risk of a portfolio is not accomplished by adjusting the equities in the portfolio, but by adjusting the level of debt by buying or selling the risk free asset (US govt bonds).
If you truly want to learn this stuff deeply, the book of choice is Brealey and Myers "Principles of Corporate Finance". I mention it since you asked, but realistically it is probably too big, thick, and academicly dense to be approached outside of a formal classroom. However, a reader who did plow through it would be rewarded.
The United States is basically the only "first-world" country that... I choose to live in.
I just don't have a problem with the death penalty.
if you think that the number 1 threat to human rights are the constitutionally and democratically sanctioned US dealth penalties, you should make sure you are on the other side from me. But if you think that repression in Cuba, North Korea, Syria, etc. is far worse, you might enlist the aid of people like me who believe in democracy to help defeat those oppressors. It's that simple.
I think people are arguing that someone shouldn't write an exploit. The argument is, you may have the right to stand up on a soapbox, but I don't want you to.
The government tried to stop encryption technology from getting out because they feared its use by black hats. DeCSS is an exploit, of course... seems like value judgements are being made about people, not principles.
I'm biased, and proud of it... And we're also human - so when someone like Sig11 pushes us too far, we respond.
Actually, you are missing what I think is the point of the criticism. There's nothing wrong with bias, opinion, emotion, etc. To many of us reading that log, the problem is that you guys were surprisingly lacking in wit/taste/cleverness... the criticisms of Signal 11 were artless and not illuminating. Nobody's saying that you ever claimed otherwise, but with Slashdot you've created a somewhat enchanting "Oz" (at least by internet standards) and it's as shocking to us as if the curtain were pulled back at the end, and the Three Stooges were exposed instead of the Wizard.
You can tone that down a bit, the analogy was exaggerated. I'm not trying to be insulting, just trying to put the right spin on the criticism to make the point that hasn't been made yet.
I'm posting this Anonymously, because I don't feel like being labelled as someone who hates the Slashdot people.
now, from reading the transcript of that session, do you think that they don't keep track of IP addresses or look at the logs when the mood strikes them? unless you DHCP or proxy with a significant number of other slashdotters, they'll know who you are if they want. Who knows, they may have it automated by now.
That's not the end of the world, of course, they do a pretty good job of letting the 1000 flowers blossom, but I doubt they do it anonymously. Otherwise, Signal 11 could get away by just changing his name.
AI concentrate on torture, political imprisonment, etc.
...and capital punishment, which they are against. While they do a lot of good work on torture and in countries with no human rights, they lose my support when they go out of their way to criticize the United States. The United States has long been the most effective proponent of human rights and democracy and I've no use for organizations that ignore it.
everything you say is pretty much on the mark, IMHO. Light weight, big disk, and battery life are everything.
PictureBooks and Vaio505's are great machines, and I'm speaking from direct experience. Above 4 pounds is too heavy for me to take seriously as portable.
After mulling your suggestion over for a bit, I think you're probably more right than wrong. There are 3 meanings I considered: civil as in civilized, civil as opposed to criminal, and civil as in civilian. The last is probably the closest. But I hope I don't sound weasely pointing out that your "violent or armed" criteria would cover civilian murder:) Also, the 'disobediance' part probably does rule out all sorts of felonies. It's more akin to refusing to things than to rioting or other criminal enterprises.
I believe that Intel "owns" SMP in some intellectual property legal sense. Have they erected any obstacles to AMDs chips being more compatible with Intel SMP?
don't be ridiculous. Sony has clearly tested it, they're about to launch it. While notebook makers do routinely exaggerate their performance, do you truly think that Sony is exaggerating more about this one? I don't see any reason why they would. You don't need independent benchmarks to evaluate this claim, nice as they would be for other purposes.
The
picture makes it look just like the other Sony Picturebook... The battery life (5.5 hours) seems less than what was first
claimed--maybe for the other Crusoe chip.
wrong. the same picturebook with the old chip has 1.5 hrs batterylife with the standard (tiny) battery pack... 5.5 hours is a huge improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
you fucking moron: you said "these days", I was just quoting you.
click the "parent" link, get a clue.
false. "these days" parents produce remarkably well adjusted children. in past generations children were treated in a way wed consider abusive today.
huh? the company doesn't have to change at all. If you opened a lemonade stand the year an ice age unexpectedly arrived in the summer, you'd lose money. it doesn't matter how perfectly you executed your plan, and it doesn't matter how good an idea it was and how unlikely it was that an ice age would come.
that's the finesse way to solve this; there is also the brute force way: if everybody on distributed.net pays a little bit of the fine, it'll be paid off in n(log(N)) time
Oh yeah? Well, why then the persistently wrong-headed bringing up mention of Gore's winning the "popular vote" as if it makes any difference at all. In the US, you get elected via the electoral college. It is not a "proxy" for the popular vote, and it is not an archaic throwback to a bygone era. It is the deal, the whole deal.
The history is, we didn't have a country: there were 13 colonies, and in order to get them to agree to form a country, a deal was struck. We have to live with the deal because it would be unfair not to. Just like Slashdot made a deal with Andover, the colonies made a deal with each other. At one time, the popular vote did not include women and slaves, and today it does not include children, though children are included in the size of the electoral college delegations (hmmm... maybe the E.C. is more representative?) Yes, smaller states get a disproportionate clout in the vote, just as the Slashdot editors get disproportionate clout (comparative to IQ and sophistication) on Slashdot. So quit bringing up the popular vote as if it matters, it doesn't.
And, even if it it does matter in a "my father can beat up your father" way, a smart person will also realize that the campaigns are run toward winning the electoral vote. If the popular vote mattered to the outcome, we'd see different campaigns and likely see a different apportioning. It's unscientific to use today's measure of the popular vote as a proxy for the national will.
The Nader inspired Freedom of Information Act cuts both ways.
Why do you hope he's not? Linux track record is better on this score. This security hole is a designed-in flaw in Windows. While all software has the potential to have bugs which cause security risks, the particular problem of launching emailed trojans or viruses is a Windows problem. Unix and Unix MTAs do not launch attachments. The user would be forced to save them to disk and manually make them executable.
the only fair thing to do is to include only the most distinctive name, which is that of the kernel, Linux.
linguistically speaking, there is something else going on: things are not named out of "fairness" (cf. mankind includes women... heck, the word woman contains the word man) but by convention. There doesn't need to be a reason to call something by a name, just a need that communities agree on names, which in this case has been agreed to be "linux".
you already know this, so forgive the "correction", but that's too broad. The definition of an OS must include that it's a platform for other software, be it applications, client/server, whatever. An app written directly on top of a chip is not an OS. According to this way of looking at it, an OS may include Internet and/or Pantone "support" as a feature, but neither is necessary for some other OS.
bullshit. Slashdot is positively sycophantic about big-name figures from all sorts of fields. What set me off was you telling me where I'd find enlightenment, so I figured I enlighten you about me, FWIW. Wouldn't you rather hear about finance from a person who's studied it? I would. So why didn't I explain everything in gory detail originally? Because it takes a lot of time. Do I have time now? No. So why am I explaining? I like to show off.
Anyhow, I'll grant some investing isn't gambling, and that part does indeed have to do with productivity.
The difference between our positions on this point is a subtle one. When I say "invest" I am referring to what the recipient of the investment does with the money, rather than the motivations of the person who makes the investment. "My" way is a little more in keeping with accounting terminology. You are saying that some people approach stock market purchases as a gamble. I'm saying there is a better way, one that bears in mind the "investment" nature of the underlying companies.
And I'm sure you'd grant that if we were all-knowing and infinitely smart, then we would all agree on the price of a share, a price that took into account all future creation of value...If this were true, stocks would never change hands
Actually, not true. You are thinking of stock prices as expected values, but they are not. They must include the very same risk premiums that you accused me of neglecting. However, the other part of risk you don't quite grasp is that risk itself and risk premiums are based on the the investor's tolerance for particular sets of stochastic events, and to risk itself. How can this be? If I were to invest in cattle futures, I'd be diversifying my portfolio, likely decreasing my overall risk. If a cattleman were to, he'd be concentrating more assets in cattle, increasing his overall risk. In that scenario, I'd rationally be willing to pay more than he would for the very same assets, ergo, trade! Conditions change, though, and risks and returns too, so the appropriate portfolio for me one day is not necessarily the appropriate one the next day... and more trading ensues. BTW, the cattle example I gave is why the market does not reward diversifiable risk: it is avoidable. So, cattle futures may be highly risky by themselves, but they decrease overall risk in a balanced portfolio, and selling cattle short absolutely reduces risk for someone who owns cattle which is why cattle futures exist in the first place. Consider: farmer needs dough now, McDonald's wishes to guarantee cattle for later, and the two parties enter into a "risky" deal that decreased both of their risk.
He believed that other investors were undervaluing Linux companies, and that he could therefore clean up by betting on them. Some days you're right...
Even if he was absolutely 100% correct that those shares were undervalued, because the market does not reward diversifiable risk, concentrating too much of a portfolio in one thing is wrong, every single day.
Nope. That investment strategy can be characterized as "on the good days you walk away with the same returns as smarter people who took fewer risks, and on the bad days you walk away with less money than smarter people who still took fewer risks."
So as I said, the average investor can only make average rates of return. To beat the average, you need to have a leg up on some other investor, whose loss is your gain.
This is the wrongness I was trying to correct in the first place. The market is not zero sum. Every day, everyone can win because the underlying assets are creating value everyday. In order to win you need to avoid needless risk. After that, there is no "average" return. There is any level of return you want, subject to risk.
A reasonable person might now ask, "Well, Mr. Smarty, if that's true then it shouldn't matter at all where I put my money, huh? As long as it's not buried in a jar in my back yard, I'll make that same average return whether I put it in stocks or bonds or CDs, right?"
By now, you perhaps understand why this and the remainder of what you said is more false than true? The risk premium that you speak of as the reward for risk is maximized only to a fully diversified portfolio, or an approximation. Repeated trading is necessary to keep an portfolio diverse, for example so as not to miss out on the internet, new pharmaceuticals, etc. BTW, adjusting the overall risk of a portfolio is not accomplished by adjusting the equities in the portfolio, but by adjusting the level of debt by buying or selling the risk free asset (US govt bonds).
If you truly want to learn this stuff deeply, the book of choice is Brealey and Myers "Principles of Corporate Finance". I mention it since you asked, but realistically it is probably too big, thick, and academicly dense to be approached outside of a formal classroom. However, a reader who did plow through it would be rewarded.
if you think that the number 1 threat to human rights are the constitutionally and democratically sanctioned US dealth penalties, you should make sure you are on the other side from me. But if you think that repression in Cuba, North Korea, Syria, etc. is far worse, you might enlist the aid of people like me who believe in democracy to help defeat those oppressors. It's that simple.
The government tried to stop encryption technology from getting out because they feared its use by black hats. DeCSS is an exploit, of course... seems like value judgements are being made about people, not principles.
I'm not trying to be a smartaleck; it seems like an interesting question to me.
Actually, you are missing what I think is the point of the criticism. There's nothing wrong with bias, opinion, emotion, etc. To many of us reading that log, the problem is that you guys were surprisingly lacking in wit/taste/cleverness... the criticisms of Signal 11 were artless and not illuminating. Nobody's saying that you ever claimed otherwise, but with Slashdot you've created a somewhat enchanting "Oz" (at least by internet standards) and it's as shocking to us as if the curtain were pulled back at the end, and the Three Stooges were exposed instead of the Wizard.
You can tone that down a bit, the analogy was exaggerated. I'm not trying to be insulting, just trying to put the right spin on the criticism to make the point that hasn't been made yet.
now, from reading the transcript of that session, do you think that they don't keep track of IP addresses or look at the logs when the mood strikes them? unless you DHCP or proxy with a significant number of other slashdotters, they'll know who you are if they want. Who knows, they may have it automated by now.
That's not the end of the world, of course, they do a pretty good job of letting the 1000 flowers blossom, but I doubt they do it anonymously. Otherwise, Signal 11 could get away by just changing his name.
...and capital punishment, which they are against. While they do a lot of good work on torture and in countries with no human rights, they lose my support when they go out of their way to criticize the United States. The United States has long been the most effective proponent of human rights and democracy and I've no use for organizations that ignore it.
everything you say is pretty much on the mark, IMHO. Light weight, big disk, and battery life are everything. PictureBooks and Vaio505's are great machines, and I'm speaking from direct experience. Above 4 pounds is too heavy for me to take seriously as portable.
Thanks for the alert call.
I believe that Intel "owns" SMP in some intellectual property legal sense. Have they erected any obstacles to AMDs chips being more compatible with Intel SMP?
the 'civil' in civil disobedience rules out the criminal options.
mmmm.... hot grits... oh yeah.
do I have to say, that's not a troll, it's a joke?
don't be ridiculous. Sony has clearly tested it, they're about to launch it. While notebook makers do routinely exaggerate their performance, do you truly think that Sony is exaggerating more about this one? I don't see any reason why they would. You don't need independent benchmarks to evaluate this claim, nice as they would be for other purposes.
forgot to also say, sony sells a quad battery for it, so think 4x longer if you can deal with some extra thickness hanging off the back.
wrong. the same picturebook with the old chip has 1.5 hrs batterylife with the standard (tiny) battery pack... 5.5 hours is a huge improvement.