You're a classic example of a drift into "pollyanna/. land" as you call it. The evidence of history shows clearly that the "intelligence agencies" have a long and negative history of distorting the political landscape in the USA (whether that's the harrassment of civil rights activists in the 60's or the FBI planting a carbomb in environmental activist Judi Barri's car), or the external activities of scum like the CIA helping rightwing terrorists to power in Latin America.
As soon as I see some example of "correction" of any sort operating on these misdeeds I'll accept that there's a working system in place to regulate this dangerous and anti-democratic part of the state apparatus.
1) The NSA is the most likely to be concerned about "unreasonable searches and seizures" and other Bill of Rights issues. The FBI and CIA routinely take the "extreme circumstance" route and use common loopholes to justify citizen and non-citizen monitoring. I would argue, however, that I have yet to see an ill-intented abuse of their power.
I'd argue that you haven't been looking very hard then.
The Church Commission clearly showed that the FBI and CIA were in cahoots spying on legitimate political activity in the US during the 60s (ya know, all those pesky civil rights people, socialists). One of the positive outcomes of the Church Commission was that a firewall was erected between the CIA and FBI. Right now all the 9-11 ambulance chasing anti-patriots are busy trying to rip down that wall and have largely succeeded in doing so.
Or you could take a look at Echelon where the nogoodniks of the State Terrorist Superpower known as the USA were conducting industrial espionage against our "allies" in Europe.
Add to this that all this "declassification" crap relates to activities years ago instead of the shenanigans going on now which is necessary to inform our voting behavior and I'd say you're pretty complacent.
From the I Didn't Understand The Article department:
Nmap and checkos have enabled investigating timestamps for years (at least 1998 IIRC?). So, how is this different? I'm guessing it's to do with the "passive" nature of the detection, the fingerprinter has to be either a man-in-the-middle ISP/NSA or else the terminator of the connection?
Would a firewall rule which rewrites all the packets to have a randomized deviation from an NTP derived timestamp overcome this? That'd seem like the simplest solution if it's true.
According to Vonage Holdings Corp. CEO Jeffrey Citron, intentional blocking of Voice over IP traffic is more than just a competitive dirty trick -- it's an act of censorship against free speech.
I'm in two minds about this. I think Vonage is very quick to fly the "Free Speech" flag and look for support from civil libertarians (and libertarians), but there's a couple of pieces missing from that picture. First is that Vonage recently admitted that they would co-operate with government spy agencies to provide backdoors. (See the VoIP panel report from SCALE3x
Now that the crowd was smelling blood another audience member asked whether or not these vendors would co-operate with foreign national governments to provide wiretap access. This appeared to agitate the panel members extremely and drew vocal reactions from most of the audience. Jeff Bonforte answered that they were a US corporation answerable to no-one but the US government and that their customers were buying equipment shipped from a US address, so why would they need to co-operate with a foreign government? The questioner then proceeded to point out that if the foreign government were a member of the WTO then they would possibly be obliged to co-operate. Darryl Strauss appeared to agree that international treaties might put a crimp in this feisty stance. There was some intimation that we all had the possibility of encryption anyway, and that moving to VoIP didn't make the situation any worse or better. The panel appeared keen to reassure the audience that this perceived problem did not matter, with Jeff Bonforte noting that at one of his previous gigs they had received frequent law-enforcement requests and although they had attempted to comply with them it was hard to get the logs and to track down the specific information requested. The result he intimated was that the requesters frequently gave up. Interestingly, given the obvious interest of the crowd in this topic and the reflexively defensive reaction of the panel, it turns out that this was one of the pre-tabled questions which the panel had agreed not to discuss because "it wasn't interesting"!
The second is that Vonage is looking to piggyback it's own private service over the back of an infrastructure created to allow all of us to communicate cheaply with each other: the internet. They don't have a god-given right to use it and they're using bandwidth shared by all of us (and often provided by heavy government subsidy using our tax dollars) for their own profit. Whining about how they're not allowed to use this for their own purposes makes about as much sense as Spam Kings whining about their Free Speech being suppressed.
On the other hand it's obviously the case that long-distance phone calls are vastly overpriced and could be done cheaper and provide many more interesting services than the current oligopolists are doing.
Oh poor you. Do you have enough to eat? Do you have leisure time? Do you have the assurance that if a disaster happens to you you'll be taken care of? Stop whining and if you don't like Sweden then emigrate to a fucked up country like the USA.
I'm sorry to have bothered you, I didn't realize that you couldn't read and that you were doing exactly what I suggested in the my previous post. Good luck with the business and the reading lessons. You'll find they complement each other nicely.
What do you mean by "open?"
SuSE, FreeS/Wan etc all existed as GPL'ed and LGPL'ed projects prior to the acquisition by Novell, so I don't see how you can give Novell credit for abiding by the terms of the copyright? Yes, Novell are great, SuSE is great, but what I'm happier about is going to be the release of new GPL'ed material.
I give customers FreeBSD unless some psycho demands LAMP on Linux. Fine
Bull. You don't _give_ your customers jack. You _sell_ them access. When the "psycho" (great provider you must be) demands LAMP on Linux then you're selling access to something that someone that is not you spent time and money producing. You're selling a service based on other people's work. That's fine. But don't pretend that you're not benefitting from work done by other people. If you want to be able to satisfy the "psycho" customer and don't want the complication of rolling your own bugfixes for _free_ Red Hat (e.g. Fedora) then pony up the cash for Red Hat Enterprise Linux or else use Whitebox or CentOS, but don't whine about your customers or about Red Hat making money out of the service they provide.
Fedora and RedHat to me is annoying - I can't bring myself to use it professionally. It changes too frequently and is poorly supported in my opinion, never fix the problems, always upgrade the packages to move the problem somewhere else.
Fedora has a circa 6 month release cycle, with support for older versions being provided by Fedora Legacy. If you want a long release-cycled supported product for "professional" use then either sell your services as a support for older versions of Fedora (merge bug-fixes back as they're reported in bugzilla) or else use Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
If you're not capable of doing that and you're not willing to pay professional money for that service from RHEL then continue to use CentOS like you say you're doing (or Whitebox).
Basically you're bitching about not getting cheap ( i.e. completely costless ) services (bug-fixes, packaging etc) so that you can re-sell them at profit to your customers.
Right now there seems to be one thing missing from LinuxLand, and that's a more complete IPCop. I want IPCop based on 2.6 and a fully working IPSec/L2TP --and-- PPTPd that works with Windows 2000 and Windows XP/2003 clients without any modifications whatsoever. RedHat should craft up someone to heavily OpenWall/SmoothWall/Astaro/IPCop/OpenBSD/Checkpoin t-Nokia/PIX/etc. Beating a PIX should be real easy.
I'd agree that smoother integration of VPNs would be nicer. Apparently OpenVPN is being looked on with favor and while I don't mind that I'd rather that SuperFreeS/Wan was going to receive some support. I think that there may be issues to do with US crypto export regulations there though.
Install Oracle 8i, Lotus Domino or SAS on RHEL, then on Fedora. Let me know if you still think they are the same.
He never said that RHEL and Fedora are the same. He was pointing out that Red Hat (i.e. up to Red Hat 9.0) is essentially a similar product to Fedora. RHEL existed at the same time as RH. RH (boxed set with support) was axed at 9.0 and Fedora replaced it. Sheeshh.
Initially, there were a lot of concerns when Novell acquired SuSE around their committment to Free Software. But they have repeatedly (YaST, SuSE Linux Open Exchange, FreeSWAN, Hula, etc.) shown that they are committed to the philosophy of Free Software - not just buying the technology to close it up, and make money from selling something proprietary.
If it's Free Software then they can't buy it up and make it proprietary because it's licensed under the GPL! I'm not saying that Novell isn't doing good stuff, but don't start attributing credit to them that's due to the people that wrote the Free software and copylefted it under the GPL.
what are the business requirements? what size business is it? what applications need to be supported? what level of support from the vendor is desired? are security clearances necessary?
unless the problem is specified more clearly it's unanswerable.
That is just completely untrue. The Oxford Classical dictionary (3rd ed. "numerals, Roman") is very clear on the point that there were two methods in use pre-mediaevally: the subtractive (IV) and the additive (IIII). I'd like you to cite something to back up your unsupported assertion that the subtractives are mediaeval.
Just a point of _sourced_ information: the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd Edition) says that the "additive" (LXIIII) and "subtractive" (LXIV) are used in the Roman Period sometimes with both versions in the same document, but the additive was preferred in official inscriptions. So the subtractive is _not_ a mediaeval innovation.
Doesn't a company that spends less on wages have more money to devote to other things (or even more workers)?
Brilliant! Why has no one else thought of that? Instead of 200 workers earning 50,000 a year they could employ 100,000 workers earning 100 a year. Soon we'll have full employment!
Well, reading the responses above this about the Licensing status it looks like this is not going to happen, probably a good thing as otherwise there'd be serious pressure to include a non-Free piece of software.
That's exactly what struck me as soon as I read this. Red Hat have been scrupulous in not shipping non-Free software and despite repeated demands from people to ship an mp3 decoder have always pointed out that they can't do that as they're a very likely target for a lawsuit.
Of course it's easy to just add one of the repositories (like ayo.freshrpms.net ) and do a "yum install mpg123 ) and all is taken care of, but this will mean that one of the most frequent gripes is taken care of.
All that has to happen now is that nvidia stay more on the ball with driver releases for the rapidly changing kernel!
Well, it's a major roadblock to the adoption of GNU/Linux by a huge number of people. Telling the consumers behind an industry that dwarfs Hollywood revenues to "adapt or get over it" is fine as far as it goes, but it means that GNU/Linux will probably never achieve a position where it dominates the creation and propagation of open standards. So we'll always be in the situation where we're fighting a behemoth (Microsoft) funded by the activities of the legions of consumers that did not "adapt or get over it".
As a Linux user, I don't find that I particularly need any applications I don't have.
Games, games, games. No, I don't play a lot of them either, but that's the number one gripe from people.
Fwiw I've only used Win2K twice in the past year and it's because I was on other people's machines in their houses. I don't miss any Win-whatever applications either, but then I wouldn't because I don't know what's in use these days.
That would be the same bug that occured for all distors using an early 2.6.kernel and partitioning code based on Parted. (e.g. SuSE 9.1) A clear write up of this problem in case someone is still suffering from it and it's solution is provided by Jef Spaleta here
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You're a classic example of a drift into "pollyanna /. land" as you call it. The evidence of history shows clearly that the "intelligence agencies" have a long and negative history of distorting the political landscape in the USA (whether that's the harrassment of civil rights activists in the 60's or the FBI planting a carbomb in environmental activist Judi Barri's car), or the external activities of scum like the CIA helping rightwing terrorists to power in Latin America.
As soon as I see some example of "correction" of any sort operating on these misdeeds I'll accept that there's a working system in place to regulate this dangerous and anti-democratic part of the state apparatus.
I'd argue that you haven't been looking very hard then.
The Church Commission clearly showed that the FBI and CIA were in cahoots spying on legitimate political activity in the US during the 60s (ya know, all those pesky civil rights people, socialists). One of the positive outcomes of the Church Commission was that a firewall was erected between the CIA and FBI. Right now all the 9-11 ambulance chasing anti-patriots are busy trying to rip down that wall and have largely succeeded in doing so.
Or you could take a look at Echelon where the nogoodniks of the State Terrorist Superpower known as the USA were conducting industrial espionage against our "allies" in Europe.
Add to this that all this "declassification" crap relates to activities years ago instead of the shenanigans going on now which is necessary to inform our voting behavior and I'd say you're pretty complacent.
The games I'll give you but watching DVDs is easy on most recent distros. Mplayer works perfectly.
And exactly and specifically what is it that you need to boot Windows in order to work?
From the I Didn't Understand The Article department: Nmap and checkos have enabled investigating timestamps for years (at least 1998 IIRC?). So, how is this different? I'm guessing it's to do with the "passive" nature of the detection, the fingerprinter has to be either a man-in-the-middle ISP/NSA or else the terminator of the connection? Would a firewall rule which rewrites all the packets to have a randomized deviation from an NTP derived timestamp overcome this? That'd seem like the simplest solution if it's true.
I'm in two minds about this. I think Vonage is very quick to fly the "Free Speech" flag and look for support from civil libertarians (and libertarians), but there's a couple of pieces missing from that picture. First is that Vonage recently admitted that they would co-operate with government spy agencies to provide backdoors. (See the VoIP panel report from SCALE3x
The second is that Vonage is looking to piggyback it's own private service over the back of an infrastructure created to allow all of us to communicate cheaply with each other: the internet. They don't have a god-given right to use it and they're using bandwidth shared by all of us (and often provided by heavy government subsidy using our tax dollars) for their own profit. Whining about how they're not allowed to use this for their own purposes makes about as much sense as Spam Kings whining about their Free Speech being suppressed.
On the other hand it's obviously the case that long-distance phone calls are vastly overpriced and could be done cheaper and provide many more interesting services than the current oligopolists are doing.
Oh poor you. Do you have enough to eat? Do you have leisure time? Do you have the assurance that if a disaster happens to you you'll be taken care of? Stop whining and if you don't like Sweden then emigrate to a fucked up country like the USA.
I'm sorry to have bothered you, I didn't realize that you couldn't read and that you were doing exactly what I suggested in the my previous post. Good luck with the business and the reading lessons. You'll find they complement each other nicely.
What do you mean by "open?"
SuSE, FreeS/Wan etc all existed as GPL'ed and LGPL'ed projects prior to the acquisition by Novell, so I don't see how you can give Novell credit for abiding by the terms of the copyright? Yes, Novell are great, SuSE is great, but what I'm happier about is going to be the release of new GPL'ed material.
Fedora has a circa 6 month release cycle, with support for older versions being provided by Fedora Legacy. If you want a long release-cycled supported product for "professional" use then either sell your services as a support for older versions of Fedora (merge bug-fixes back as they're reported in bugzilla) or else use Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
If you're not capable of doing that and you're not willing to pay professional money for that service from RHEL then continue to use CentOS like you say you're doing (or Whitebox).
Basically you're bitching about not getting cheap ( i.e. completely costless ) services (bug-fixes, packaging etc) so that you can re-sell them at profit to your customers.
I'd agree that smoother integration of VPNs would be nicer. Apparently OpenVPN is being looked on with favor and while I don't mind that I'd rather that SuperFreeS/Wan was going to receive some support. I think that there may be issues to do with US crypto export regulations there though.what are the business requirements? what size business is it? what applications need to be supported? what level of support from the vendor is desired? are security clearances necessary? unless the problem is specified more clearly it's unanswerable.
That is just completely untrue. The Oxford Classical dictionary (3rd ed. "numerals, Roman") is very clear on the point that there were two methods in use pre-mediaevally: the subtractive (IV) and the additive (IIII). I'd like you to cite something to back up your unsupported assertion that the subtractives are mediaeval.
Just a point of _sourced_ information: the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd Edition) says that the "additive" (LXIIII) and "subtractive" (LXIV) are used in the Roman Period sometimes with both versions in the same document, but the additive was preferred in official inscriptions. So the subtractive is _not_ a mediaeval innovation.
Raskin's work is based on Fitt's Law and Hicks' Law.
Well, reading the responses above this about the Licensing status it looks like this is not going to happen, probably a good thing as otherwise there'd be serious pressure to include a non-Free piece of software.
That's exactly what struck me as soon as I read this. Red Hat have been scrupulous in not shipping non-Free software and despite repeated demands from people to ship an mp3 decoder have always pointed out that they can't do that as they're a very likely target for a lawsuit.
Of course it's easy to just add one of the repositories (like ayo.freshrpms.net ) and do a "yum install mpg123 ) and all is taken care of, but this will mean that one of the most frequent gripes is taken care of.
All that has to happen now is that nvidia stay more on the ball with driver releases for the rapidly changing kernel!
Well, it's a major roadblock to the adoption of GNU/Linux by a huge number of people. Telling the consumers behind an industry that dwarfs Hollywood revenues to "adapt or get over it" is fine as far as it goes, but it means that GNU/Linux will probably never achieve a position where it dominates the creation and propagation of open standards. So we'll always be in the situation where we're fighting a behemoth (Microsoft) funded by the activities of the legions of consumers that did not "adapt or get over it".
Games, games, games. No, I don't play a lot of them either, but that's the number one gripe from people.
Fwiw I've only used Win2K twice in the past year and it's because I was on other people's machines in their houses. I don't miss any Win-whatever applications either, but then I wouldn't because I don't know what's in use these days.
That would be the same bug that occured for all distors using an early 2.6.kernel and partitioning code based on Parted. (e.g. SuSE 9.1) A clear write up of this problem in case someone is still suffering from it and it's solution is provided by Jef Spaleta here