But if you happen to buy a piece of hardware at the store that's not on the distribution's hardware compatibility list, it probably won't include a Linux driver on a disc either. Now what?
After that, I wake up and stop dreaming about the past.
In an industry where one is expected to lower your retails costs by 25% every year simply to stay competitive, I can't say I blame them.
If they could fit enough into the BIOS to have it connect to their servers and redownload your OS in case of drive failure, why the hell not go that route? One less plastic disk the world doesn't need.
If you're saying that he refused to release a password for a database, then either hire a consultant to forcefully reset the password, or contact the vendor of the software for a solution.
Despite being a jackass with no bus-factor plan, he appears to have sufficient technical capacity to build a system that could not readily be broken into using the methods you suggest. Doing so would have wiped the router configurations (they were not committed to flash, no backups were kept)
The crux of his conviction was based on the fact that he did not grant access to the system when requested by his employer. There are many ways to do that beyond giving up the passwords he used. He could have created new administrative accounts with new passwords. He could have given them access to a console logged in with his credentials.
He thought he could stonewall them. He now has plenty of time to examine the stone walls he built around himself.
if two car bombs went off in New York city and killed eight, would you just shrug that off as normal everyday police work?
If some random art students put up Light-Brites around a city, would you prefer to involve the military? Major police departments have bomb squads for a reason.
To be fair, Microsoft-branded hardware has a track record of being pretty damn good. When they put their branding on mice/keyboards/game controllers, I've generally found those products to be well-designed and robust. They generally get enough market penetration that device support for anything unusual gets fast-tracked into the linux kernel.
"It just works" has a coolness factor of its very own.
Some people want other people's information to be free, but that's about as far as it goes.
The context of the original quote:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other
"Information wants to be free" is referring to the constant dropping of the distribution costs and the lack of inherent scarcity.
I doubt there is a significant overlap between the people who follow computer security and online privacy issues and the people who still leave their Facebook profiles open for search indexing.
I would assume the opposite is true. People who actually understand computer security and online privacy issues would be more likely to realize that Facebook's "privacy settings" do not actually protect anything. Those people will only post content to Facebook that they intend to publish to the entire world and leave the settings to default open-access, since that's the whole point, and Facebook is a convenient place to publish.
The people who don't understand security and privacy will rely on the "don't let my ex see these photos" checkboxes to keep their data secure.
They can't "just" reverse it because the customers' cards weren't stolen, the customers initiated the transaction, and they received the "merchandise"
Apparently you have a shitty credit card provider. If you have a good provider, it works like this:
-You complain about the charge -CC company takes the charge off your bill -CC company does the legwork resolving the issue with the merchant -CC company apologizes to you for your inconvenience
If your credit provider isn't willing to fight for you, why are you doing business with them?
Motorcycles have a lot of speed, high acceleration and maneuverability, little mass, and very little between the rider and the road. If he'd met another vehicle at 127mph
Mass * Velocity squared
600 lb at 127 mph has the same kinetic energy as a three-ton truck at 40 mph.
The DMCA only really applies when you distribute copies after circumventing copy protection. If you keep them to yourself, you are operating within the bounds of fair use
"Fair Use" is an available defense against an allegation of copyright infringement. If nothing is being copied, then saying it is "within the bounds of fair use" is like saying it is "within the bounds of self-defense", or "within the bounds of insanity".
Also, keep in mind that claiming a "Fair Use" defense means you are recognizing the applicable law as valid, and you are admitting guilt in violating that law. You are using the defense solely to mitigate your liability. The term has quite a bit of baggage attached...don't toss it around lightly if you don't know what you are talking about and expect people to understand you.
Hardware that is literally the only thing keeping you alive should be subject to some regulation. I don't think code-reviews by bureaucrats is a good option, but perhaps independent third parties would be a start.
Given that basically all such devices have been reviewed by Underwriter Laboratories or an equivalent OSHA recognized testing lab already, I don't see what needs to change.
Despite all the flaws of the US tort system, it does provide a strong financial incentive for things like pacemakers to be designed robustly. And yes, the code also gets reviewed.
It may surprise people, but the system being proposed is already in place and it works pretty well.
Actually, you can do that stuff yourself. File a claim with the courts for recovery of your possession, send a subpoena to the ISP, get the address, then either serve papers to continue the possession claim or hand the address to the state police.
Another option is to visit your local congresscritter's office. If you can get a staffer to send a "yo, what's the holdup here?" letter on behalf of your representative, that usually greases the wheels just enough to get them moving again. This is also a good way to restock on pens, buttons, and bumper stickers if you happen to be running low.
With video cards you have to turn your brain on a bit and do some research to determine what you are really getting. No way to give you a single, universally applicable, number.
From an engineering viewpoint, that statement is absolutely true. The end user, however, doesn't spend their day benchmarking...they care about one thing: does X card run Y game at Z settings?. At one time I cared about clock speed, memory speed, pipelines, etc, but not any more.
What I'm saying is that my money is up for grabs for the video card manufacturer that is willing to maintain a database that answers the only question that matters: will it work? Beyond that, I just don't give a fuck anymore. I've seen the forest for the benchmarks.
AMD lowers their prices, which they can do quite easily.
Whichever company restores sanity to their chipset numbering scheme will get my money.
"Bargain" or not, it's simply not worth my time to investigate each card and decipher how a 460 GTX would perform compare to my 8800 GTX. My four year-old card has so far handled every game I've thrown at it at 1920x1080 without giving me the impression that I'm lacking on the eye-candy.
I have the money to spare, but I no longer have the free time to make a hobby of staying up to date on all the graphics card releases. All the manufacturers are failing to sell me on how returning to a more frequent upgrade cycle would improve my life, and they certainly aren't making it easy (in terms of time) to find out the relevant details.
I think its a sign of desperation. They know they are losing the war, and instead of changing with the times, they are adopting basically undefensable, unwinnable strategies.
Given that I'd never heard of these sites until they got some federally subsidized free publicity, I'd have to agree with you.
That said, I'd love to see the MPAA turn around and sue the Feds for contributory copyright infringement.
If they do it to avoid prosecution why not take it one step further and just start hosting the items themselves?
Because they are more interested in promoting free speech than actually distributing copyrighted materials. They want to show that free speech is absolute, even when it happens to be inconvenient to other parties. They want to make sure that hosting a website that basically lists people interested in engaging in copyright infringement should be allowed as free speech.
It's the same reason the NRA fights assault weapons bans in the US. The vast majority of gun owners couldn't give two shits about high-powered assault rifles, but as long as the debate is squarely focused on those, then their hunting rifles and target pistols will remain relatively unrestricted.
The Pirate Party isn't really interested in providing easy access to your "0-day warez!!11!!!ONE!!1". That's just a means to get people thinking and talking about what free speech is and should be and to focus debate on modifying existing copyright laws, which are, in their opinion, a source of undue enrichment for media consortia.
This is easy for the firetruck or EMS to handle because they've got the coordinates and they're responding immediately.
Not necessarily. You could be reporting a fire in your downstairs neighbor's apartment. Imminent danger to human safety trumps privacy rights if they are in conflict. In some cases, imminent danger to property can also trump privacy. You want the fire department to put an axe through your neighbor's door now, not after calling his hotel room in the Bahamas. Society is pretty okay with emergency services barging in wherever they deem necessary, and gives them the benefit of the doubt in borderline cases. Generally, it has not been a problem.
Police, on the other hand, act as both emergency services and do investigative work. In the first role, society is also okay with them exercising the same privileges as other emergency personnel, but not okay with them extending those liberties into performing the second role.
What we really need is a more formalized and audited method for police departments to use a Chinese Wall to separate their roles.
It's possible to fly above the clouds with a blimp - at least low clouds - but generally airships travel at low altitudes. I think the record is at 20000 feet or something, a lot lower than commercial airliners.
Huh? All of the altitude records for manned and unmanned aircraft are held by balloons and blimps. The only things that go higher than blimps are rocket-powered. Current record manned ballooning record is 113,740 ft.
The intellectual property belongs to we, the people, not we, the creators. I no more own the works I create than I own the house I rent; in both cases I have a limited time monopoly on the property, but it isn't MY property. My house belongs to my landlord and my IP belongs to humanity.
Land is a good analogy to copyrights. Even your landlord doesn't own the actual land under the house you rent. Society owns that land and gives your landlord certain exclusive rights of using that land. These rights are a subset of the full rights of ownership. He does own those rights, but never the land itself. If society chooses to repurpose the land and build a highway, that is a right of ownership that society has retained.
After all, it makes sense to have some ability to control our own work.
One you publish it, it's not "yours"; you don't own it. The phrase "control our own work" loses all meaning when applied to published content. If you don't understand this, you don't understand the Constitution, since it's the fundamental principle behind copyright law.
Congress shall have the power: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The two most important points here: 1) The purpose of copyright is not to enrich authors and inventors. It exists to provide incentive to authors and inventors to publish their works for the benefit of society. 2) Congress can limit the duration a copyright and can do so without due process. Congress can't expire your rights to things you actually own, like the shirt on your back.
If you have an unpublished manuscript, you own that. Destroy it, toss it in a fire, do whatever you like with it; it's yours. The moment you publish, you give up your ownership. You have no rights to recall, revoke, or destroy the copy of your published manuscript that is in my head. That's mine, not yours.
However, we like manuscripts, and we want you to write them. In exchange, we offer you a time-limited exclusive control over certain rights of ownership. We will never give back ownership (we can't), but we will give you back a taste of what you had before you published. This is your payment for publishing the manuscript and giving up ownership. We wish you the best in exploiting those rights as you see fit.
Just don't make the mistake of thinking you still own your published material or that you even should own it. The rights a person has over their own thoughts in their own head supercede any and all property rights.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." --Thomas Jefferson
Moreover, isn't it kind of silly to point at an example of someone already having written the code to do something as a way of saying that doing it is difficult?
Not when people think their 12-character regex that they just thought up will validate an email address.
The whole point of the article is that too many programmers think a one-liner can suffice when they should be using an existing library that has been hammered upon for 20 years.
Email address verification is hard. "No it isn't! See! ^[^@]+@[^@]+$ "
Handling names is hard. "No it isn't! See! SELECT FROM publishers WHERE name = 'O'Reilly' "
It's basic laziness. You know what really is hard? Getting one-liner guy to actually sit down and think about a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you happen to buy a piece of hardware at the store that's not on the distribution's hardware compatibility list, it probably won't include a Linux driver on a disc either. Now what?
After that, I wake up and stop dreaming about the past.
Welcome to the 21st century.
That's how close we're watching costs these days?
In an industry where one is expected to lower your retails costs by 25% every year simply to stay competitive, I can't say I blame them.
If they could fit enough into the BIOS to have it connect to their servers and redownload your OS in case of drive failure, why the hell not go that route? One less plastic disk the world doesn't need.
If you're saying that he refused to release a password for a database, then either hire a consultant to forcefully reset the password, or contact the vendor of the software for a solution.
Despite being a jackass with no bus-factor plan, he appears to have sufficient technical capacity to build a system that could not readily be broken into using the methods you suggest. Doing so would have wiped the router configurations (they were not committed to flash, no backups were kept)
The crux of his conviction was based on the fact that he did not grant access to the system when requested by his employer. There are many ways to do that beyond giving up the passwords he used. He could have created new administrative accounts with new passwords. He could have given them access to a console logged in with his credentials.
He thought he could stonewall them. He now has plenty of time to examine the stone walls he built around himself.
if two car bombs went off in New York city and killed eight, would you just shrug that off as normal everyday police work?
If some random art students put up Light-Brites around a city, would you prefer to involve the military? Major police departments have bomb squads for a reason.
To be fair, Microsoft-branded hardware has a track record of being pretty damn good. When they put their branding on mice/keyboards/game controllers, I've generally found those products to be well-designed and robust. They generally get enough market penetration that device support for anything unusual gets fast-tracked into the linux kernel.
"It just works" has a coolness factor of its very own.
Information doesn't want to be free
Some people want other people's information to be free, but that's about as far as it goes.
The context of the original quote:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other
"Information wants to be free" is referring to the constant dropping of the distribution costs and the lack of inherent scarcity.
I doubt there is a significant overlap between the people who follow computer security and online privacy issues and the people who still leave their Facebook profiles open for search indexing.
I would assume the opposite is true. People who actually understand computer security and online privacy issues would be more likely to realize that Facebook's "privacy settings" do not actually protect anything. Those people will only post content to Facebook that they intend to publish to the entire world and leave the settings to default open-access, since that's the whole point, and Facebook is a convenient place to publish.
The people who don't understand security and privacy will rely on the "don't let my ex see these photos" checkboxes to keep their data secure.
They can't "just" reverse it because the customers' cards weren't stolen, the customers initiated the transaction, and they received the "merchandise"
Apparently you have a shitty credit card provider. If you have a good provider, it works like this:
-You complain about the charge
-CC company takes the charge off your bill
-CC company does the legwork resolving the issue with the merchant
-CC company apologizes to you for your inconvenience
If your credit provider isn't willing to fight for you, why are you doing business with them?
Motorcycles have a lot of speed, high acceleration and maneuverability, little mass, and very little between the rider and the road. If he'd met another vehicle at 127mph
Mass * Velocity squared
600 lb at 127 mph has the same kinetic energy as a three-ton truck at 40 mph.
People should also focus on how unnecessarily dangerous that traffic stop was.
Why did off-duty officer feel it was necessary to endanger his own life, the motorcyclist and the life of the motorists in the nearby vehicles?
The "victim" was driving 127mph on a public road with other traffic around. Who was placing whom in danger again?
(and he wasn't driving a Toyota, either)
To be fair, I think that computer-centric people tend to get asked for free work more often that most other professions
Apparently you have never owned a truck.
The DMCA only really applies when you distribute copies after circumventing copy protection. If you keep them to yourself, you are operating within the bounds of fair use
"Fair Use" is an available defense against an allegation of copyright infringement. If nothing is being copied, then saying it is "within the bounds of fair use" is like saying it is "within the bounds of self-defense", or "within the bounds of insanity".
Also, keep in mind that claiming a "Fair Use" defense means you are recognizing the applicable law as valid, and you are admitting guilt in violating that law. You are using the defense solely to mitigate your liability. The term has quite a bit of baggage attached...don't toss it around lightly if you don't know what you are talking about and expect people to understand you.
Hardware that is literally the only thing keeping you alive should be subject to some regulation. I don't think code-reviews by bureaucrats is a good option, but perhaps independent third parties would be a start.
Given that basically all such devices have been reviewed by Underwriter Laboratories or an equivalent OSHA recognized testing lab already, I don't see what needs to change.
Despite all the flaws of the US tort system, it does provide a strong financial incentive for things like pacemakers to be designed robustly. And yes, the code also gets reviewed.
It may surprise people, but the system being proposed is already in place and it works pretty well.
Remember, German technology put the first man on the moon.
Ven the rockets are up, who cares vere they down?
"That's not my department", says Wernher von Braun
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun
Actually, you can do that stuff yourself. File a claim with the courts for recovery of your possession, send a subpoena to the ISP, get the address, then either serve papers to continue the possession claim or hand the address to the state police.
Another option is to visit your local congresscritter's office. If you can get a staffer to send a "yo, what's the holdup here?" letter on behalf of your representative, that usually greases the wheels just enough to get them moving again. This is also a good way to restock on pens, buttons, and bumper stickers if you happen to be running low.
With video cards you have to turn your brain on a bit and do some research to determine what you are really getting. No way to give you a single, universally applicable, number.
From an engineering viewpoint, that statement is absolutely true. The end user, however, doesn't spend their day benchmarking...they care about one thing: does X card run Y game at Z settings?. At one time I cared about clock speed, memory speed, pipelines, etc, but not any more.
What I'm saying is that my money is up for grabs for the video card manufacturer that is willing to maintain a database that answers the only question that matters: will it work? Beyond that, I just don't give a fuck anymore. I've seen the forest for the benchmarks.
AMD lowers their prices, which they can do quite easily.
Whichever company restores sanity to their chipset numbering scheme will get my money.
"Bargain" or not, it's simply not worth my time to investigate each card and decipher how a 460 GTX would perform compare to my 8800 GTX. My four year-old card has so far handled every game I've thrown at it at 1920x1080 without giving me the impression that I'm lacking on the eye-candy.
I have the money to spare, but I no longer have the free time to make a hobby of staying up to date on all the graphics card releases. All the manufacturers are failing to sell me on how returning to a more frequent upgrade cycle would improve my life, and they certainly aren't making it easy (in terms of time) to find out the relevant details.
I think its a sign of desperation. They know they are losing the war, and instead of changing with the times, they are adopting basically undefensable, unwinnable strategies.
Given that I'd never heard of these sites until they got some federally subsidized free publicity, I'd have to agree with you.
That said, I'd love to see the MPAA turn around and sue the Feds for contributory copyright infringement.
If they do it to avoid prosecution why not take it one step further and just start hosting the items themselves?
Because they are more interested in promoting free speech than actually distributing copyrighted materials. They want to show that free speech is absolute, even when it happens to be inconvenient to other parties. They want to make sure that hosting a website that basically lists people interested in engaging in copyright infringement should be allowed as free speech.
It's the same reason the NRA fights assault weapons bans in the US. The vast majority of gun owners couldn't give two shits about high-powered assault rifles, but as long as the debate is squarely focused on those, then their hunting rifles and target pistols will remain relatively unrestricted.
The Pirate Party isn't really interested in providing easy access to your "0-day warez!!11!!!ONE!!1". That's just a means to get people thinking and talking about what free speech is and should be and to focus debate on modifying existing copyright laws, which are, in their opinion, a source of undue enrichment for media consortia.
Global warming denial is like creationism, it's based on blind faith and its supporters will never give up.
And the assumption that the Earth has some type of natural temperature from which is it not supposed to deviate, what is that belief based on?
This is easy for the firetruck or EMS to handle because they've got the coordinates and they're responding immediately.
Not necessarily. You could be reporting a fire in your downstairs neighbor's apartment. Imminent danger to human safety trumps privacy rights if they are in conflict. In some cases, imminent danger to property can also trump privacy. You want the fire department to put an axe through your neighbor's door now, not after calling his hotel room in the Bahamas. Society is pretty okay with emergency services barging in wherever they deem necessary, and gives them the benefit of the doubt in borderline cases. Generally, it has not been a problem.
Police, on the other hand, act as both emergency services and do investigative work. In the first role, society is also okay with them exercising the same privileges as other emergency personnel, but not okay with them extending those liberties into performing the second role.
What we really need is a more formalized and audited method for police departments to use a Chinese Wall to separate their roles.
It's possible to fly above the clouds with a blimp - at least low clouds - but generally airships travel at low altitudes. I think the record is at 20000 feet or something, a lot lower than commercial airliners.
Huh? All of the altitude records for manned and unmanned aircraft are held by balloons and blimps. The only things that go higher than blimps are rocket-powered. Current record manned ballooning record is 113,740 ft.
The intellectual property belongs to we, the people, not we, the creators. I no more own the works I create than I own the house I rent; in both cases I have a limited time monopoly on the property, but it isn't MY property. My house belongs to my landlord and my IP belongs to humanity.
Land is a good analogy to copyrights. Even your landlord doesn't own the actual land under the house you rent. Society owns that land and gives your landlord certain exclusive rights of using that land. These rights are a subset of the full rights of ownership. He does own those rights, but never the land itself. If society chooses to repurpose the land and build a highway, that is a right of ownership that society has retained.
After all, it makes sense to have some ability to control our own work.
One you publish it, it's not "yours"; you don't own it. The phrase "control our own work" loses all meaning when applied to published content. If you don't understand this, you don't understand the Constitution, since it's the fundamental principle behind copyright law.
Congress shall have the power:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The two most important points here:
1) The purpose of copyright is not to enrich authors and inventors. It exists to provide incentive to authors and inventors to publish their works for the benefit of society.
2) Congress can limit the duration a copyright and can do so without due process. Congress can't expire your rights to things you actually own, like the shirt on your back.
If you have an unpublished manuscript, you own that. Destroy it, toss it in a fire, do whatever you like with it; it's yours. The moment you publish, you give up your ownership. You have no rights to recall, revoke, or destroy the copy of your published manuscript that is in my head. That's mine, not yours.
However, we like manuscripts, and we want you to write them. In exchange, we offer you a time-limited exclusive control over certain rights of ownership. We will never give back ownership (we can't), but we will give you back a taste of what you had before you published. This is your payment for publishing the manuscript and giving up ownership. We wish you the best in exploiting those rights as you see fit.
Just don't make the mistake of thinking you still own your published material or that you even should own it. The rights a person has over their own thoughts in their own head supercede any and all property rights.
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." --Thomas Jefferson
Moreover, isn't it kind of silly to point at an example of someone already having written the code to do something as a way of saying that doing it is difficult?
Not when people think their 12-character regex that they just thought up will validate an email address.
The whole point of the article is that too many programmers think a one-liner can suffice when they should be using an existing library that has been hammered upon for 20 years.
Email address verification is hard. "No it isn't! See! ^[^@]+@[^@]+$ "
Handling names is hard. "No it isn't! See! SELECT FROM publishers WHERE name = 'O'Reilly' "
It's basic laziness. You know what really is hard? Getting one-liner guy to actually sit down and think about a problem.