The protestant work ethic has no mercy on those who aren't able
that neither follows from the ethic, nor do we see it in practice.
it does, however, maximize the productivity of those who are able, thus increasing the wealth of society at large, as we can see in all of the protestant countries, those countries that do the best at providing for the unfortunate. kills you, doesn't it, that your failed ideology has no exemplars. To put it in Slashdot terms, communism is the 8008 of processor chips.
That story sounds apochryphal, Brittanicized or not. Remember, there were no urban legend debunking websites in the Middle Ages. My sense would be that all of the words were associated with the city, and the story was retrofit.
Your references did lend to your post a certain gravitas, so here are more from m-w.com, and which will link you to Brittanica:
that wasn't very funny because you actually believe it. a small lesson in how the economy and people's lives really work:
I urge you to
dedicate a chunk of your life working hard doing something worthwhile, so worthwhile to someone else they actually pay you
which puts food on your table and enables you to keep doing it.
Your ideas are so good that it makes sense for you to hire other people and teach them to do it
and they dedicate a part of their lives to doing it and it puts food on their tables.
You and some of your employees devote some of your free time to unpaid work,
feeling very good about yourselves, holier than thou even
till you realize the more paid work you do, the more you income you create and can then spend
which puts far more other people to work
and gives you cash you can donate to non-profits if you want, till you realize that
the volunteers at those organizations feel holier than you
and do a very limited amount of good compared to those who give paid jobs to the poor and disadvantaged.
Yeah, yeah, I know, lots of volunteers do lots of good work. But they're only able to volunteer because the vast bulk of the economy exists to take care of most people through the charity of paid work, paid work that feeds the vast bulk of the people quality food, and comes up with lifesaving medicine, heated houses, tax revenues to take care of the unfortunate... oh I could go on... so by all means, volunteer!... volunteer to work overtime and get paid for it, you owe it to your fellow man. You will not be called a hero, but you will be a hero, because the best antidote to poverty is the vast wealth, capital and intellectual, of a robust economy.
of course those icons on web pages sure don't get any more legible
I completely can't understand this point of view. Every single icon I know of is too freakin huge. I run 1600x1200 at work, and 17--x13-- at home just so I can get the icons, titlebars, and other widgets small enough to allow my content windows to reclaim some of the desktop.
and I never hear anyone else support this point of view... are you all going blind from too much you know what, particularly you UI designers? What is with the huge freakin icons!
Does it make me happy to have the larger resolution displays become standard? NO! When they become standard, all of the wankers will simply adapt, and start issuing ever larger spoodge.gifs to fill up the new screens.
Does anybody know of any mechanisms that would render Akamai ineffective immediately? When you surf websites that use Akamai, much of what you pull down comes via Akamai which means that Akamai can track you and what you are viewing as you move around the web just like Doublecross-- er... Doubleclick does. Akamai is the new big brother. They've published no privacy policy that says they won't spy on you. Using Akamai to get around a blocking filter is like using no condom to get around using a condom: dangerous
It's not as simple as "tilted in favor of corporations." The point is that it's all been litigated so much in Delaware that the answers are well-known, and the courts are well-trained. Companies don't particularly care how things are tilted any more than anyone else cares. But they do care a lot about uncertainty. It's much easier to run a company when you know what is required, what are the regulations, etc.
Look, I don't even disagree with you. But the issue here is not the way we wish things were, but the way things are. The DMCA is bad because it dictated this decision. If it didn't dictate this decision, it wouldn't be bad. To paraphrase you,
If
we can't get judges to enforce the DMCA, why the hell
*have* a DMCA ? But, the problem with that argument is that we can get judges to enforce it, and the enforcement leads to sites getting shut down. This argument that CSS is not "good" so therefore you should be allowed to ignore the law is silly. If a doorlock is not good enough should you be allowed to open it and go inside?
I think you should be allowed to reverse engineer and decrypt, but the law says otherwise.
Looking through the documents, it appears that the judge was under the
impression that an encrypted file could not be copied.
Well, without rereading or reading more than is interesting to me, what I did read was that the judge said [paraphrase] "for playing on players without the special decrypter", so at least in that example the judge was going to the trouble to point out that he understood the technology. The judge probably, I'm not a mind-reader, extended that to mean "which decrypter was designed to thwart copy protection schemes which in turn the DMCA was designed to protect, therefore this is a violation of the DMCA."
Why is everyone on Slashdot having trouble swallowing this explanation of the verdict? The moderators are having a field day squelching any attempts to find a rational explanation.
I'll take "blame" for two words in a quote that I accidently
let slip through, for which I apologize, but while they might have
contributed to setting you off, you did not reference them.
I come across condescending? I don't give a flying fuck,
I judge arguments on their merits, and I think you should too. What you quoted me saying was actually pretty good advice. And some of
the smartest people I know are complete assholes; I've found it comes with the territory. But, since you've expressed interest in this sort of thing, you come
across self-righteous and ideological, particularly with your use of
the term "disservice": I wrote what I believe, and who cares if it's a
"disservice". I would never cover up the truth even if that would be a
"service" to a cause.
The two words I let slip through by accident were where the judge
said "without charge". Now, neither the judge nor I mentioned
copying. He could have meant "breaking into a disk the defendants had
purchased without paying an additional charge" which is how I interpret it, but I can see how you would get the wrong impression from that.
However, you quote me saying something perfectly reasonable which you
must have gotten
flipped around backward in your fevered imagination. When I said
"exclusive of copying" that means
"excluding copying". I explicity do not accuse them of copying or
copyright violations. That's what exclusive means, so without that you have
zero basis to accuse me of attributing to the defendents a
belief in info-[wants-to]-be-free ideology. And, without that,
your entire post is a NOP.
What I'm accusing them of is believing that once you buy the disk
and take it home, you can do what you want with it yourself (info-wants-to-roam-free-in-my-own-house) and I
even condescend to admitting that I like that idea myself. Boy, if
that's not condescending, I don't know what is. I'd hate to be a
member of any condescended club that would accept me! Are you saying they don't believe that?
Anyway, my
overarching point was that their defense looks like a fiction to the judge precisely
because it contained fiction. Judges and courts do not like fictions.
A good example of fiction in their
defense was "use it with linux", but as the judge pointed out, they
showed intent to use DeCSS with Windows.
I explicitly disclaimed any particular knowledge of the parties
involved, but you climb right up on your high horse to point out
that they are [paraphrasing] sophisticated 40 year olds...
Big deal, in my own example I used Bill Gates so clearly chronological
age nor sophistication had nothing to do with my point... that sort of thing might have triggered
a perceptive person to reread my post, but not you.
I guess, condescending to Bill
Gates OK in your book, so long as I don't question some "movement"
icon.
If you misread a few words that I wrote and went off half-cocked, I
understand, I've done the same thing myself. But if in reading this
further explanation you continue to hold your [not just stupid but boring]
beliefs about what I wrote, then...
...well then nothing. Slashdot's really
starting to suck, so why shouldn't you contribute too?
You know how long that defense would hold up in court, right? nanoseconds.
I'm not siding against you, just warning you as somebody on the same side that no court would let you get away with that, especially now that you've detailed the whole point of the enterprise right here in black and white. You have captured the essence of where things went wrong for the DeCSS defendents, though.
There is an important lesson for computer nerds here, about the legal system that legal nerds have fashioned for us all, that, while not perfect, mostly does work. It took them several thousand years to do it (remember, not "internet time":) so it possibly should not be dismissed with some "reverse engineering" at least.
Certainly it's possible that the judge saw the programmers as punk kids (heck, the defendants may actually be punk kidz) and it's certainly possible that the judge is as crooked as all get-out. I have no particular info about any of the three sides in the trial so I'm trying not to come down on any side. But I wanted to offer an explanation that's consistent with the facts I know and which does not entail a crooked judge. "never ascribe to ill-intent that which can be explained by incompetence"... but in this case I'm referring to the potential for incompetence on the part of the defendents.
Courts try to get at the "truth" in a very plain way. Nerds, who grew up smarter than their parents and teachers, are used to outwitting authority by providing complex (where complex equals a delta more than their parents can understand) explanations for why rule transgressions should not be treated as rule transgressions. Nerds get so used to getting away with this, and they've seen enough TV where the defendants get off on a technicality, that they begin to believe that this is what flies in a courtroom.
This is what happened to Bill Gates in his anti-trust defense. He came up with what he considered to be a plausible explanation for Microsoft's behavior, and an explanation which did not entail monopoly behavior. But the courts didn't buy it, because Microsoft engaged in other activities (in particular, emails) that were consistent with a monopoly misbehaving. Distill it all down: MS is a misbehaving monopoly because they from time to time seemed to consider their own behavior in that light as they engaged in it.
MP3.com... do I need to go into detail about this one: they came up with a nice excuse, yes, but they also had emails which showed that they were trying to figure out a way to facilitate copying of copyrighted material. That kind of evidence really taints the defendent in the eyes of the court. Had they from the start pursued a messianic goal of allowing indie artists an alternative means of distribution, they'd have a much stronger leg to stand on.
What's my point? Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information
should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer
systems or data storage media in which it is located. Now, if that's not literally true, I think it is true enough. Remember, the judge is not an expert in this domain. Defendents are adherents to a movement believes that if you "buy" the DVD at the store (I put that in quotes because I don't want to address the issue of what exactly you are buying, a license, plastic, etc.) you should be allowed to do whatever you want with it, exclusive of giving copies to other people. I believe that too. The law unfortunately does not agree with us.
I'm bringing this whole harangue up in hopes that some of you kidz out there can save yourselves a lot of grief: if you want to get involved in this sort of stuff, testing the limits of the law and whatnot, that's great, but keep your motives pure, no winking, no smirking, and you'll be better off at the showdown. The judge is not necessarily your enemy, but he will be if he thinks you're a smartass. Start by taking off that T-shirt.
good idea and good info, but not necessarily what you want or need: ipchains rules will remain intact through upping and downing, so you wouldn't need to reload the rules over and over.
But you are pointing out that if you ever boot without ipchains loaded it would be nice to have the rules get loaded if you up the net manually.
It sounds like you might be in the know--what other books are
good? (I'm not up for full-frontal Chomsky yet...)
yep, Chomsky's the one about due for a full-frontal:)
Um... I might not be too helpful, I studied linguistics as a minor years ago, so we used textbooks and course notes, not quite as much fun as Pinker (who I've heard on the radio). If you really want to pursue it, an intro textbook would probably be the right thing, a good mix of anecdotes and lessons. The thing to be careful of is that there is a lot of linguistics out there that is thinly disguised politics: you want the real serious science, not some warmed-over ideology. The course I started with was MIT's 24.900J -- not much at that site, but I'm mentioning it because you could go to one of those textbook websites and order the textbook they use for that course. Or call the MIT Coop in Cambridge to find out what book they have for it in the bookstore.
On a more serious note, wouldn't any attacker be immediately blocked as soon as the chains
come up, or would his connection be allowed because it already exists?
Good point. Yes, the blocking would begin immediately... but that could easily be too late: a scripted compromise can take place very quickly (think how long it takes you to get a pure text webpage, less than a second), and if it immediately opens an outgoing connection, the firewall is unlikely to block that. depending on what all else happens during boot, it could very well be possible for an attacker to initiate the compromise and simultaneously launch some sort of "SoS" (slowdown-of-service:) that would delay the rest of the boot process. The point is that if you publish your firewalling and boot process for educational purposes, a determined attacker has more specific information to work with. While it might seem unlikely, if someone doesn't like you in particular, or has reason to want something from your machine, that window of opportunity could be all they need.
But it is clear evidence of Slashdot's decline, and I'm not trolling or flaming. In the past when questions like this came up, there were always linguists around who would have shot the original question full of holes within the first 50 posts. Now, thank God for him, we rely on an IANALinguist who has read Pinker's book at least. Oh well... This poster gets many bonus points for the precise way he phrased it: even if C is close to English, it doesn't matter.
Yes, it is correct that Japanese people formulate thoughts pretty much the same way as everyone else, and they formulate what they are to say the same way also, and their language is just as capable of expressing their full range of thinking. Churchill does not have the evidence he would need to make his claim, unless it hinges on a particular phrase here or there that accidently turned out significant, something like (please forgive me in advance) "I meant Bud Right!";)
It is possible, though, that Japanese cultural conventions and norms might lead to less effective communication in some circumstances, but it would also need to be pointed out that they probably would have advantages in other circumstances. I'm referring to deference to authority, for example: sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. It is also possible that slight differences in the genetics of IQ could play a role. Japanese test slightly higher overall on standard IQ tests than Europeans, but that's based on math. They actually test weaker on language skills, and yes that testing was controlled for culture.
Placing a computer behind an NAT firewall is no safer than just running the
firewall on the computer itself.
The point you are making is a good one, so you should consider this post to be supportive, but you are overstating it a bit so I would refine it. Yes, in the home, the hassle of running an extra box is probably not worth it (if you don't find it a hassle, you probably aren't keeping up with the patches), and yes, theoretically you are running the same software on two machines, so all the same holes exist and you actually have more chances for error so perhaps it is less secure.
However, I think two factors give the two-box version the potential to truly be more secure: (1) on a shared firewall/workstation box, you are likely to be changing things more often. I'm awfully careful, but every now and then I discover I've left a window wide open.
(2) with a separate firewall box, you can clamp the security down very tightly on the firewall box, allowing no remote connections, only forwarding. In this way your logs of any activity will be secure from tampering.
now, truth be told, once there are two boxes running, the itch to add capabilities to the firewall becomes irresistable (now, there's a good reason to make it an 8Meg 386!)
initializing your ipchains via rc.local as you suggest leaves you highly vulnerable for a short period of time whenever you reboot. You need to run the script before the network is started
if you look in/etc/rc.d/rc{3,5}.d/ you will see the SnnNetwork startup script. put a symbolic link named SnnFirewall to your firewall script. replace the nn with a smaller number than
the network script uses.
now that people are actually working on it
Debian GNU/Hurd might be usuable in two years time.
Cool! HURD was a great idea. Though long-awaited, GNU/HURD will be terrific. And as soon as it's available, I've no doubt I'll be switching to RedHat/HURD:) That's what I love about Free software!
it was not a troll, but it was someone who was running out the door to go away for the weekend:)
It's good for McDonalds because they get the syrup cheaper and it's good for Coke
... [and you left out] it's bad for the consumer not to have the choice, especially when such choice is likely to put competitive pressure toward lowering prices. I'd qualify my position on economics as radical free market. Quick example: movie theaters should be required to offer competition in the lobby for food vendors and if some movies (bad ones) are not offered at a lower price than the most popular, that should be prima facie evidence of illegal price collusion.
The scenario you offer whereby the deal is struck between the soft drink makers and the fast food joints is certainly plausible, but many price collusive monopoly or cartel pricing schemes are equally plausible. My point is that they should be illegal. "Sell ours exclusively" should not come with a lower price: it hurts the economy.
He didn't post a lie. He said "I think...". Are you saying he doesn't think that? Because I think he does think it, and you are the closest one to a liar in this discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
that neither follows from the ethic, nor do we see it in practice.
it does, however, maximize the productivity of those who are able, thus increasing the wealth of society at large, as we can see in all of the protestant countries, those countries that do the best at providing for the unfortunate. kills you, doesn't it, that your failed ideology has no exemplars. To put it in Slashdot terms, communism is the 8008 of processor chips.
and I missed where in the world or in history you've seen the elimination of private property leading to anything good?
Your references did lend to your post a certain gravitas, so here are more from m-w.com, and which will link you to Brittanica:
Taranto
tarantella
tarantula
tarantism
BTW, did you note that the Brittanica article said that the music was a tarantella, not the dance.
I urge you to
Yeah, yeah, I know, lots of volunteers do lots of good work. But they're only able to volunteer because the vast bulk of the economy exists to take care of most people through the charity of paid work, paid work that feeds the vast bulk of the people quality food, and comes up with lifesaving medicine, heated houses, tax revenues to take care of the unfortunate... oh I could go on... so by all means, volunteer! ... volunteer to work overtime and get paid for it, you owe it to your fellow man. You will not be called a hero, but you will be a hero, because the best antidote to poverty is the vast wealth, capital and intellectual, of a robust economy.
I completely can't understand this point of view. Every single icon I know of is too freakin huge. I run 1600x1200 at work, and 17--x13-- at home just so I can get the icons, titlebars, and other widgets small enough to allow my content windows to reclaim some of the desktop.
and I never hear anyone else support this point of view... are you all going blind from too much you know what, particularly you UI designers? What is with the huge freakin icons!
Does it make me happy to have the larger resolution displays become standard? NO! When they become standard, all of the wankers will simply adapt, and start issuing ever larger spoodge.gifs to fill up the new screens.
Does anybody know of any mechanisms that would render Akamai ineffective immediately? When you surf websites that use Akamai, much of what you pull down comes via Akamai which means that Akamai can track you and what you are viewing as you move around the web just like Doublecross-- er... Doubleclick does. Akamai is the new big brother. They've published no privacy policy that says they won't spy on you. Using Akamai to get around a blocking filter is like using no condom to get around using a condom: dangerous
It has nothing to do with tarantulae, as in spiders. It has everything to do with the city of Taranto.
they've dropped the price to 250
It's not as simple as "tilted in favor of corporations." The point is that it's all been litigated so much in Delaware that the answers are well-known, and the courts are well-trained. Companies don't particularly care how things are tilted any more than anyone else cares. But they do care a lot about uncertainty. It's much easier to run a company when you know what is required, what are the regulations, etc.
Look, I don't even disagree with you. But the issue here is not the way we wish things were, but the way things are. The DMCA is bad because it dictated this decision. If it didn't dictate this decision, it wouldn't be bad. To paraphrase you, If we can't get judges to enforce the DMCA, why the hell *have* a DMCA ? But, the problem with that argument is that we can get judges to enforce it, and the enforcement leads to sites getting shut down. This argument that CSS is not "good" so therefore you should be allowed to ignore the law is silly. If a doorlock is not good enough should you be allowed to open it and go inside?
I think you should be allowed to reverse engineer and decrypt, but the law says otherwise.
Well, without rereading or reading more than is interesting to me, what I did read was that the judge said [paraphrase] "for playing on players without the special decrypter", so at least in that example the judge was going to the trouble to point out that he understood the technology. The judge probably, I'm not a mind-reader, extended that to mean "which decrypter was designed to thwart copy protection schemes which in turn the DMCA was designed to protect, therefore this is a violation of the DMCA."
Why is everyone on Slashdot having trouble swallowing this explanation of the verdict? The moderators are having a field day squelching any attempts to find a rational explanation.
completely.
I'll take "blame" for two words in a quote that I accidently let slip through, for which I apologize, but while they might have contributed to setting you off, you did not reference them.
I come across condescending? I don't give a flying fuck, I judge arguments on their merits, and I think you should too. What you quoted me saying was actually pretty good advice. And some of the smartest people I know are complete assholes; I've found it comes with the territory. But, since you've expressed interest in this sort of thing, you come across self-righteous and ideological, particularly with your use of the term "disservice": I wrote what I believe, and who cares if it's a "disservice". I would never cover up the truth even if that would be a "service" to a cause.
The two words I let slip through by accident were where the judge said "without charge". Now, neither the judge nor I mentioned copying. He could have meant "breaking into a disk the defendants had purchased without paying an additional charge" which is how I interpret it, but I can see how you would get the wrong impression from that. However, you quote me saying something perfectly reasonable which you must have gotten flipped around backward in your fevered imagination. When I said "exclusive of copying" that means "excluding copying". I explicity do not accuse them of copying or copyright violations. That's what exclusive means, so without that you have zero basis to accuse me of attributing to the defendents a belief in info-[wants-to]-be-free ideology. And, without that, your entire post is a NOP.
What I'm accusing them of is believing that once you buy the disk and take it home, you can do what you want with it yourself (info-wants-to-roam-free-in-my-own-house) and I even condescend to admitting that I like that idea myself. Boy, if that's not condescending, I don't know what is. I'd hate to be a member of any condescended club that would accept me! Are you saying they don't believe that?
Anyway, my overarching point was that their defense looks like a fiction to the judge precisely because it contained fiction. Judges and courts do not like fictions. A good example of fiction in their defense was "use it with linux", but as the judge pointed out, they showed intent to use DeCSS with Windows.
I explicitly disclaimed any particular knowledge of the parties involved, but you climb right up on your high horse to point out that they are [paraphrasing] sophisticated 40 year olds... Big deal, in my own example I used Bill Gates so clearly chronological age nor sophistication had nothing to do with my point... that sort of thing might have triggered a perceptive person to reread my post, but not you. I guess, condescending to Bill Gates OK in your book, so long as I don't question some "movement" icon.
If you misread a few words that I wrote and went off half-cocked, I understand, I've done the same thing myself. But if in reading this further explanation you continue to hold your [not just stupid but boring] beliefs about what I wrote, then ...
...well then nothing. Slashdot's really starting to suck, so why shouldn't you contribute too?
I'm not siding against you, just warning you as somebody on the same side that no court would let you get away with that, especially now that you've detailed the whole point of the enterprise right here in black and white. You have captured the essence of where things went wrong for the DeCSS defendents, though.
Did judge Kaplan miss the point? Yeah. Was he biased? No.
you should have said: Was he biased? This [having worked at a lawfirm that did work for the MPAA] cannot be taken as evidence of bias.
My point is, you do not know that the judge is otherwise not biased.
Certainly it's possible that the judge saw the programmers as punk kids (heck, the defendants may actually be punk kidz) and it's certainly possible that the judge is as crooked as all get-out. I have no particular info about any of the three sides in the trial so I'm trying not to come down on any side. But I wanted to offer an explanation that's consistent with the facts I know and which does not entail a crooked judge. "never ascribe to ill-intent that which can be explained by incompetence"... but in this case I'm referring to the potential for incompetence on the part of the defendents.
Courts try to get at the "truth" in a very plain way. Nerds, who grew up smarter than their parents and teachers, are used to outwitting authority by providing complex (where complex equals a delta more than their parents can understand) explanations for why rule transgressions should not be treated as rule transgressions. Nerds get so used to getting away with this, and they've seen enough TV where the defendants get off on a technicality, that they begin to believe that this is what flies in a courtroom.
This is what happened to Bill Gates in his anti-trust defense. He came up with what he considered to be a plausible explanation for Microsoft's behavior, and an explanation which did not entail monopoly behavior. But the courts didn't buy it, because Microsoft engaged in other activities (in particular, emails) that were consistent with a monopoly misbehaving. Distill it all down: MS is a misbehaving monopoly because they from time to time seemed to consider their own behavior in that light as they engaged in it.
MP3.com... do I need to go into detail about this one: they came up with a nice excuse, yes, but they also had emails which showed that they were trying to figure out a way to facilitate copying of copyrighted material. That kind of evidence really taints the defendent in the eyes of the court. Had they from the start pursued a messianic goal of allowing indie artists an alternative means of distribution, they'd have a much stronger leg to stand on.
What's my point? Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located. Now, if that's not literally true, I think it is true enough. Remember, the judge is not an expert in this domain. Defendents are adherents to a movement believes that if you "buy" the DVD at the store (I put that in quotes because I don't want to address the issue of what exactly you are buying, a license, plastic, etc.) you should be allowed to do whatever you want with it, exclusive of giving copies to other people. I believe that too. The law unfortunately does not agree with us.
I'm bringing this whole harangue up in hopes that some of you kidz out there can save yourselves a lot of grief: if you want to get involved in this sort of stuff, testing the limits of the law and whatnot, that's great, but keep your motives pure, no winking, no smirking, and you'll be better off at the showdown. The judge is not necessarily your enemy, but he will be if he thinks you're a smartass. Start by taking off that T-shirt.
But you are pointing out that if you ever boot without ipchains loaded it would be nice to have the rules get loaded if you up the net manually.
yep, Chomsky's the one about due for a full-frontal :)
Um... I might not be too helpful, I studied linguistics as a minor years ago, so we used textbooks and course notes, not quite as much fun as Pinker (who I've heard on the radio). If you really want to pursue it, an intro textbook would probably be the right thing, a good mix of anecdotes and lessons. The thing to be careful of is that there is a lot of linguistics out there that is thinly disguised politics: you want the real serious science, not some warmed-over ideology. The course I started with was MIT's 24.900J -- not much at that site, but I'm mentioning it because you could go to one of those textbook websites and order the textbook they use for that course. Or call the MIT Coop in Cambridge to find out what book they have for it in the bookstore.
Good point. Yes, the blocking would begin immediately... but that could easily be too late: a scripted compromise can take place very quickly (think how long it takes you to get a pure text webpage, less than a second), and if it immediately opens an outgoing connection, the firewall is unlikely to block that. depending on what all else happens during boot, it could very well be possible for an attacker to initiate the compromise and simultaneously launch some sort of "SoS" (slowdown-of-service :) that would delay the rest of the boot process. The point is that if you publish your firewalling and boot process for educational purposes, a determined attacker has more specific information to work with. While it might seem unlikely, if someone doesn't like you in particular, or has reason to want something from your machine, that window of opportunity could be all they need.
But it is clear evidence of Slashdot's decline, and I'm not trolling or flaming. In the past when questions like this came up, there were always linguists around who would have shot the original question full of holes within the first 50 posts. Now, thank God for him, we rely on an IANALinguist who has read Pinker's book at least. Oh well... This poster gets many bonus points for the precise way he phrased it: even if C is close to English, it doesn't matter.
Yes, it is correct that Japanese people formulate thoughts pretty much the same way as everyone else, and they formulate what they are to say the same way also, and their language is just as capable of expressing their full range of thinking. Churchill does not have the evidence he would need to make his claim, unless it hinges on a particular phrase here or there that accidently turned out significant, something like (please forgive me in advance) "I meant Bud Right!" ;)
It is possible, though, that Japanese cultural conventions and norms might lead to less effective communication in some circumstances, but it would also need to be pointed out that they probably would have advantages in other circumstances. I'm referring to deference to authority, for example: sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. It is also possible that slight differences in the genetics of IQ could play a role. Japanese test slightly higher overall on standard IQ tests than Europeans, but that's based on math. They actually test weaker on language skills, and yes that testing was controlled for culture.
The point you are making is a good one, so you should consider this post to be supportive, but you are overstating it a bit so I would refine it. Yes, in the home, the hassle of running an extra box is probably not worth it (if you don't find it a hassle, you probably aren't keeping up with the patches), and yes, theoretically you are running the same software on two machines, so all the same holes exist and you actually have more chances for error so perhaps it is less secure.
However, I think two factors give the two-box version the potential to truly be more secure: (1) on a shared firewall/workstation box, you are likely to be changing things more often. I'm awfully careful, but every now and then I discover I've left a window wide open. (2) with a separate firewall box, you can clamp the security down very tightly on the firewall box, allowing no remote connections, only forwarding. In this way your logs of any activity will be secure from tampering.
now, truth be told, once there are two boxes running, the itch to add capabilities to the firewall becomes irresistable (now, there's a good reason to make it an 8Meg 386!)
if you look in /etc/rc.d/rc{3,5}.d/ you will see the SnnNetwork startup script. put a symbolic link named SnnFirewall to your firewall script. replace the nn with a smaller number than
the network script uses.
Cool! HURD was a great idea. Though long-awaited, GNU/HURD will be terrific. And as soon as it's available, I've no doubt I'll be switching to RedHat/HURD :) That's what I love about Free software!
It's good for McDonalds because they get the syrup cheaper and it's good for Coke
... [and you left out] it's bad for the consumer not to have the choice, especially when such choice is likely to put competitive pressure toward lowering prices. I'd qualify my position on economics as radical free market. Quick example: movie theaters should be required to offer competition in the lobby for food vendors and if some movies (bad ones) are not offered at a lower price than the most popular, that should be prima facie evidence of illegal price collusion.
The scenario you offer whereby the deal is struck between the soft drink makers and the fast food joints is certainly plausible, but many price collusive monopoly or cartel pricing schemes are equally plausible. My point is that they should be illegal. "Sell ours exclusively" should not come with a lower price: it hurts the economy.
IHMO this sort of practice should be illegal. free markets need to be protected from monopoly practices and this is a monopoly practice.
He didn't post a lie. He said "I think...". Are you saying he doesn't think that? Because I think he does think it, and you are the closest one to a liar in this discussion.