Anyone who saw even his earliest writing (ie. in Kuro5hin when he was just interning) is aware that he views everything through the highly tinted lens of internal Microsoft propaganda.
In any case Google are still best positioned to control the web for the forseeable future and Microsoft is thus being bonzaied into competing in the operating system arena and having their lunch eaten by Apple on the desktop front and GNU/Linux on the server front.
At least Mono means that all the time that Dare has invested in.Net won't be completely wasted:)
Except that's a pretty good community and is more clueful and ethical than many of the for-money providers.
The problem with CAcert is not on the support end, it's the fact that their root certificate is not distributed with current browsers. Each potential verificant would have to import their cert manually.
Supposedly that's changing slowly with the Mozilla Foundation spelling out exactly what the audit process is to allow the inclusion of CAcert.
We can but wait and hope.
Personally I'd rather have community support for something like this.
And, as previously reported on Slashdot, they effectively shut down a ratemysolicitor.com site based in the Republic of Ireland before that. Boycott GoDaddy.
instead of telling them to foil the NSA by sending encrypted emails none of their recipients will ever be able to read.
You seem intent on painting all desire for privacy as expression of an unreasonable paranoia. GPG-encrypted emails to and from work are a reasonable precaution in many cases. I've certainly felt a lot happier that my boss hasn't known I've been negotiating another job. Similarly I have no desire to share all sorts of information with Google (love their web interface, use it often but am absolutely not interested in having my admittedly very interesting love life stored for ever on their servers).
Historically, your neighbors knew everything about you.
Sure. But now it's possible for centralized bureaucracy to know everything about everyone's neighbor and actually do some interesting analysis on that. The practical applications range from the most mundane such as electoral redistricting to a better ability to decide that it's not worth putting a new hospital in your neighborhood because there are too many fat people. We could bicker all day about how desirable such outcomes are, but pretending that they're not novel doesn't really fly.
If you still want advice: pick some security issues that have practical, bottom-line benefits
Like?
we're returning to the way humans have always lived.
Except that it's only a very recent development that it's possible to correlate so much information on so many aspects of individuals. Except that back in Arcadia it was a bit difficult to impersonate someone else because everyone knew your face. Except that if you did want to disappear and start again it was possible to do so as long as you had enough capital. Et cetera.
No, I'm upset that Ubuntu contributes so little back to the community. As clearly stated in my post they have the right to use Free Software (duh!), what's irritating is that the Ubuntu community give back so little to the community at large. An ideal ecosystem sees all participants taking and giving in equal measure. Is that so hard for you to understand?
Nah, Debian definitely does not suck. Every piece of Debian infrastructure is Free Software. Debian devlopers contribute heavily to the kernel and a myriad of other important projects. Again, remind me what software Ubuntu contributes to the "community"?
Sharing is caring. I guess Ubuntu doesn't care very much then.
Well, yeah, I agree that it's marketing. My objection is that it's verging on the dishonest and that seems to permeate much of the enthusiasm behind Ubuntu. For instance their parent company Canonical still has not released the sourcecode to Launchpad! How absolutely hypocritical is that? A company which makes free use (as they should be able to) of FL/OSS software and then sits on top of the one thing which their developers did apparently create on their own.
Do Ubuntu developers do anything besides tweak color palettes and write bullshit press releases which fail to give credit to the actual producers of the software which they parasitize?
Other stuff not-coded-by-the-Canonical-parasites: NetworkManager, PolicyKit, the kernel, Nautilus, drivers, aptitude...
PulseAudio works great in Fedora 8. That's not really surprizing as the primary developer is a Red Hat employee (see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/LennartPoettering ). It's weird the way Ubuntu advocacy pieces rarely mention that most of the software which is touted as being part of the Ubuntu experience is usually programmed by Debian or Red Hat or Novell developers.
For me the immediate worry is that Yahoo's developers will be pulled off neat projects like YUI. Yes, it's BSD licensed so it'd be possible for other people to continue it, but Yahoo! have hired some awesome people and allowed them to do good work in this area. I'd hate it if Microsoft got to kill off a good department because it competed with Silverlight or whatever.NET crap they way to push tomorrow.
An email archive provides a more compact (hence more easily searchable), organized and readable view of who-said-what-when than a massive, arbitrarily nested, possibly edited, possibly misquoted top-post abomination.
IM and IRC are useful for the very early stages of planning, but unless people are obsessive about keeping (and editing and publishing) logs then they often mean that much work has to be duplicated and triplicated later. And the same lazy impulse that many people seem to have about writing usually means that those logs are most definitely NOT edited and published.
The attitude regarding corporate email is unfortunately widely shared as witnessed by the current wikipedia article on top-posting. The tortured justifications of top-posting with full-quote under in the discussion page are amusing until you receive the product of such thinking.
Email is a great tool for massive distributed and near-instantaneous communication: viz, many FLOSS projects from the kernel on downwards. If you really need informal chat then the telephone or walking down the hall is better -- then it/really/ is off the record and instantaneous.
The requirement to cover your ass can still be kept while not doing away with the advantages of a properly quoted email.
OK. I'm going to go try the evaluation based on your recommendation. As regards your last point I've been using different version control systems for years to organize work and LyX has had easy RCS integration for the last couple of releases. All you need to do is "mkdir RCS" then LyX -> File -> VersionControl -> Check In Changes. I haven't figured out how to get it work with Mercurial or other distributed VCSs but I'm sure it's possible.
I'd love a (polite, although obviously anonymous) reply from the individual who moderated this post down, explaining why they did so. Just interested? Obama supporter perhaps?
There was a very nice Redistricting game released by U.S.C. students last year which explains some of the issues in a US context. I thought it was a great piece of educational software.
I find it hard to disagree with you. But if we are going to vote then at least voting for someone that might reduce the interference in our lives makes sense.
For long projects I've found LyX to be the easiest environment due to its WYSYWIM paradigm and easy handling of references, notes and citations. It's just very easy to simply get down to work with LyX. I'll grant you that I quite like the feature of Scrivener where one can have inspirational/reference material included in the appropriate section folder, but I wonder would it become distracting?
The problem however is that no matter what system, we are voting for politicians.
Even if you weren't voting for a politician you would still be voting for someone that you have to trust to implement their promised platform. There is virtually no means by which an ineffective (or down right duplicitous) office holder (I guess that's nearly a definition of a politician!) can be removed from office under any of the available systems. Looking at your country's description of the voting system certainly doesn't seem to indicate it, and the only instances which I can think of in N.America was a brief movement by the left-wing CCF in Canada in the 1930s and then by the right-wing Reform Party in the 1990s.
Really, the idea that we have to trust some professional sleazebag to do what they promise even when we know they won't -- so much so that it's almost a cliche -- makes me wonder how anyone can rationalize voting to themselves. Still, I guess MTV told us to "rock the vote" or something.
Anyone want to bet that in a cringeworthy display of how we just don't get it that Barrack Obama becomes the next president and keeps on implementing the agenda of the wealthy coterie that runs politics?
MIT and its associated personnel are heavily subsidized (as they should be) by our taxes. Our taxes which go to supporting the creation and sharing of knowledge for the common good. The problem is that corporations like Intel get to cherry pick the succesful research and sell it back to us at inflated prices without contributing a fair amount of money towards the support of those educational and research insitutions: we pay for THEIR R&D. In the case of the OLPC project Intel's position is an even clearer and more exaggerated version of the above problem.
Furthermore, I don't see how Intel developing low priced laptops hurts the developing world
Do you think we live in a post-scarcity economy where NAND Flash grows on trees? Do you understand that demand creates a shortage which raises prices. Are you aware that there are such production shortfalls in these components that increased usage in the wealthy nations will exacerbate the shortage.
Fucking the developing nations NOW by an opportunistic attempt to exploit technologies developed explicitly to assist those nations is just greed pure and simple. Intel are cunts and you are a particularly stupid cunt.
I agree. Intel are just seeking to benefit from the original research and development which was initiated as a result of Negroponte's non-profit. This desire of large corporations to leech of the innovation undertaken largely by academia is a developing trend and what makes this instance more disgusting is that the people hit hardest by this are the kids in the developing world that Intel is now refusing to help.
A secondary point in this discussion is that people seem to forget that there are and have been shortages of e.g. Flash memory and other commodities and Intel is effectively now committing itself to driving up the price of those parts by repackaging (probably with Mary Lou Jepsen's help) the innovations of the OLPC so that rich geeks can have yet even more toys.
There is no way that Intel comes out of this without looking like complete cunts.
And LG (along with Nokia and Apple and Samsung) has been one of the major players stymying the adoption of non-patentencumbered video formats as base webstandards
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who saw even his earliest writing (ie. in Kuro5hin when he was just interning) is aware that he views everything through the highly tinted lens of internal Microsoft propaganda.
In any case Google are still best positioned to control the web for the forseeable future and Microsoft is thus being bonzaied into competing in the operating system arena and having their lunch eaten by Apple on the desktop front and GNU/Linux on the server front.
At least Mono means that all the time that Dare has invested in .Net won't be completely wasted :)
Except that's a pretty good community and is more clueful and ethical than many of the for-money providers. The problem with CAcert is not on the support end, it's the fact that their root certificate is not distributed with current browsers. Each potential verificant would have to import their cert manually. Supposedly that's changing slowly with the Mozilla Foundation spelling out exactly what the audit process is to allow the inclusion of CAcert. We can but wait and hope. Personally I'd rather have community support for something like this.
And, as previously reported on Slashdot, they effectively shut down a ratemysolicitor.com site based in the Republic of Ireland before that. Boycott GoDaddy.
And not just the above, but the "WebSlices" crap is just another way to muddy the Atom/RSS waters. We do NOT need another feed "standard" thanks.
No, I'm upset that Ubuntu contributes so little back to the community. As clearly stated in my post they have the right to use Free Software (duh!), what's irritating is that the Ubuntu community give back so little to the community at large. An ideal ecosystem sees all participants taking and giving in equal measure. Is that so hard for you to understand?
Nah, Debian definitely does not suck. Every piece of Debian infrastructure is Free Software. Debian devlopers contribute heavily to the kernel and a myriad of other important projects. Again, remind me what software Ubuntu contributes to the "community"?
Sharing is caring.
I guess Ubuntu doesn't care very much then.
Well, yeah, I agree that it's marketing. My objection is that it's verging on the dishonest and that seems to permeate much of the enthusiasm behind Ubuntu. For instance their parent company Canonical still has not released the sourcecode to Launchpad! How absolutely hypocritical is that? A company which makes free use (as they should be able to) of FL/OSS software and then sits on top of the one thing which their developers did apparently create on their own. Do Ubuntu developers do anything besides tweak color palettes and write bullshit press releases which fail to give credit to the actual producers of the software which they parasitize? Other stuff not-coded-by-the-Canonical-parasites: NetworkManager, PolicyKit, the kernel, Nautilus, drivers, aptitude ...
PulseAudio works great in Fedora 8. That's not really surprizing as the primary developer is a Red Hat employee (see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/LennartPoettering ). It's weird the way Ubuntu advocacy pieces rarely mention that most of the software which is touted as being part of the Ubuntu experience is usually programmed by Debian or Red Hat or Novell developers.
For me the immediate worry is that Yahoo's developers will be pulled off neat projects like YUI. Yes, it's BSD licensed so it'd be possible for other people to continue it, but Yahoo! have hired some awesome people and allowed them to do good work in this area. I'd hate it if Microsoft got to kill off a good department because it competed with Silverlight or whatever .NET crap they way to push tomorrow.
Yup, e.g. Pidgin/Gaim have OTR available. I just use it by default. http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/
An email archive provides a more compact (hence more easily searchable), organized and readable view of who-said-what-when than a massive, arbitrarily nested, possibly edited, possibly misquoted top-post abomination.
IM and IRC are useful for the very early stages of planning, but unless people are obsessive about keeping (and editing and publishing) logs then they often mean that much work has to be duplicated and triplicated later. And the same lazy impulse that many people seem to have about writing usually means that those logs are most definitely NOT edited and published.
The attitude regarding corporate email is unfortunately widely shared as witnessed by the current wikipedia article on top-posting. The tortured justifications of top-posting with full-quote under in the discussion page are amusing until you receive the product of such thinking.
Email is a great tool for massive distributed and near-instantaneous communication: viz, many FLOSS projects from the kernel on downwards. If you really need informal chat then the telephone or walking down the hall is better -- then it /really/ is off the record and instantaneous.
The requirement to cover your ass can still be kept while not doing away with the advantages of a properly quoted email.
I am simultaneously heartened and disheartened! Thanks. ;)
OK. I'm going to go try the evaluation based on your recommendation. As regards your last point I've been using different version control systems for years to organize work and LyX has had easy RCS integration for the last couple of releases. All you need to do is "mkdir RCS" then LyX -> File -> VersionControl -> Check In Changes. I haven't figured out how to get it work with Mercurial or other distributed VCSs but I'm sure it's possible.
Ha ha. Sorry about that. Weird Yellow Stuff Is Warping Your Mind.
I'd love a (polite, although obviously anonymous) reply from the individual who moderated this post down, explaining why they did so. Just interested? Obama supporter perhaps?
There was a very nice Redistricting game released by U.S.C. students last year which explains some of the issues in a US context. I thought it was a great piece of educational software.
I find it hard to disagree with you. But if we are going to vote then at least voting for someone that might reduce the interference in our lives makes sense.
For long projects I've found LyX to be the easiest environment due to its WYSYWIM paradigm and easy handling of references, notes and citations. It's just very easy to simply get down to work with LyX. I'll grant you that I quite like the feature of Scrivener where one can have inspirational/reference material included in the appropriate section folder, but I wonder would it become distracting?
Even if you weren't voting for a politician you would still be voting for someone that you have to trust to implement their promised platform. There is virtually no means by which an ineffective (or down right duplicitous) office holder (I guess that's nearly a definition of a politician!) can be removed from office under any of the available systems. Looking at your country's description of the voting system certainly doesn't seem to indicate it, and the only instances which I can think of in N.America was a brief movement by the left-wing CCF in Canada in the 1930s and then by the right-wing Reform Party in the 1990s.
Really, the idea that we have to trust some professional sleazebag to do what they promise even when we know they won't -- so much so that it's almost a cliche -- makes me wonder how anyone can rationalize voting to themselves. Still, I guess MTV told us to "rock the vote" or something.
Anyone want to bet that in a cringeworthy display of how we just don't get it that Barrack Obama becomes the next president and keeps on implementing the agenda of the wealthy coterie that runs politics?
Libertarian is the only vote that makes sense.
Yeah. Yeah. And of course there will be no video spec in HTML5, especially not one that depends on a patent-encumbered method. Yeah.
I agree. Intel are just seeking to benefit from the original research and development which was initiated as a result of Negroponte's non-profit. This desire of large corporations to leech of the innovation undertaken largely by academia is a developing trend and what makes this instance more disgusting is that the people hit hardest by this are the kids in the developing world that Intel is now refusing to help. A secondary point in this discussion is that people seem to forget that there are and have been shortages of e.g. Flash memory and other commodities and Intel is effectively now committing itself to driving up the price of those parts by repackaging (probably with Mary Lou Jepsen's help) the innovations of the OLPC so that rich geeks can have yet even more toys. There is no way that Intel comes out of this without looking like complete cunts.
And LG (along with Nokia and Apple and Samsung) has been one of the major players stymying the adoption of non-patentencumbered video formats as base webstandards