Whatever is good for the USER is what should get implmented
Sure, in general. But there's always a trade-off; if implementing this means that the code is likely to be buggier, or the executable bigger, or performance slower, than you have to ask if it's really better for the user.
[It shouldn't do any of these things, as the code really ought to be talking to some sort of meta-widget that aggregates a real widget; this makes porting *much* easier, but...]
What I don't understand is why the people complaining about evil themes don't create a theme which *looks just like standard widgets* and then get people shipping themable applications to use that as their default...
I worry about these lawsuits for a couple of reasons.
(1) Some day, I might do something which seems perfectly innocuous to me, but which offends an entrenched interest who decides to take me to court. The only way I can prevent that is by understanding who gets sued and why, and acting to voice my outrage when I think a suit is offensive.
(2) As an active member of the software development industry, I am interested in trying to find ways that we can increase the quality of the products we are developing, and reduce the stress involved in developing them. Things like UCITA are the wrong way to go, if that is your goal.
(3) As a citizen who believes, by and large, that the country I live in is one of the most 'progressive' and 'free' societies *in history*, I have an interest in keeping it that way --- and many of these lawsuits will have the opposite effect (as will the type of civil disobedience you seem to be advocating).
Sure, I can stick my head in the sand. But that buys me a moment's comfort at the cost of the battle.
Keep a spare airfare in your bank in case she needs help
That's a good idea. Along similar lines, if she can get access to an American Express card, she should absolutely do so --- they have the feature of having *no cash advance limit*, which means that if for some reason she has to buy an emergency plane ticket out of the middle of nowhere, she can do so.
[Sure, she has to pay it back that month --- but she's here, considering how to pay the fee, not there, considering how to get out.]
Close enough. Totally different cultures, sure, but within 80 miles of each other in a city which is continuous between them.
Hell, I live in *Santa Cruz*, which is seperated from both by a mountain, and when travelling in foreign countries I normally say i'm from San Francisco.
Absent such identification, pre-existing economic entities have predominant roles -- think corporations and unions
Ah, but that misses the point entirely: there was a time in history when unions didn't exist, and someone had to fight to create them. I think the originator of this thread is essentially calling for the organization of something which would have the same influence, in favor of tech industry workers, that the unions did in their heyday.
The problem with this is that it's unlikely to happen --- we (read: tech industry workers) won't have the drive to be politically motivated on that kind of scale unless something makes us angry, and we're sadly deficient in anger right now.
That's one of the funniest political statement's i've seen in a long time:
tell your governments to start standing up to the US and stop being our lapdogs! After all, if we lose the battle to stop and reverse the hemorrage of civil liberties here, it would be nice to have somewhere to escape to
A citizen of a theoretically democratic country exhorting citizens of other countries to stop his country, so he has a place to escape to when things get bad ---- something is very, very wrong with the picture.
But there is still the issue of wrongly blocked sites.
The thing which I find most bewildering about censorware software is how many of the popular ones --- and both ones which have generated articles on slashdot recently --- make it impossible to find out what is being blocked.
One company claims that the list is a "trade secret", and Mattel doesn't publishe theirs --- and somehow that makes the censorware software seem much, much, much more sinister than it is intended to be.
it follows by definition that I will be interested in lame Science Fiction. This is just one example of Slashdot's ongoing pandering to negative nerd stereotypes. Another example is the assumption that we are all fans of open source, and share the same sense ofcommunity spirit. I suppose Slashdot's owners assume we are fat, friendless heavy metal fans who have never been laid in our lives.
The assumption that all Slashdot readers are fans of open source is halfway reasonable --- this is a site that grew up around Linux, an open source operating system, after all. The community spirit bit is also important as a prequisite to the function of the site: threaded discussions do not work well without community spirirt, as many USENET group denizens discovered to their horror in the mid-90s.
As for science fiction: you have a point that often slashdot has more fluff content than hard technical news, and bits about science fiction are heavily involved in that; but it is also true that, for the majority of people in this industry, science fiction forms an important part of the culture --- and Dune, in particular, is part of the limited canon of books (along with The Lord of the Rings, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Ender's Game, among others) that it can be reasonably assumed that anyone who has read any science fiction at all has read.
*shrug* You can't expect a news service for "nerds" to not talk about such things.
The truly absurd thing is that Symantec claims that the list of sites the software blocks is a trade secret. Thus, potential customers are not allowed to find out what the software blocks!
"Install our software! It blocks bad sites!" "Which sites in particular does it block?" "Bad ones!" "Which bad sites?" "We can't tell you which ones, because then someone else might come along and block the same sites."
Microwave ovens existed, barely. Cable TV? VCRS/CDs? Let alone the internet and computers?
That's just in terms of products that weren't available then. Then add things like: you can give people artificial hearts? What is this AIDS thing, anyway? What do you mean gasoline is $1.80 a gallon?
The trick is --- it doesn't _feel_ that different, to anyone who lived through it. But in reality, we're a completely different society; and, in the same way, the world of 2040 won't feel that different from today, for those of us who live through it --- but, taken as snapshots, and then compared, they would be completely different.
Hmmm... is religion something that people "retreat" into?
I can see how that could easily be read as a slam on religion --- which isn't what I intended. But i've seen a lot of people who are vaguely associated with some religion discover that, by becoming more religious, they have an anchor they found missing in the world as a whole; so I think, for some segments of society, religion will be the answer to the fatigue.
Not for everyone --- and people that are anti-religious would probably get pushed the other way, as you described --- but, for many. *shrug*
In the afterword to Earth, David Brin talks at length about how difficult it is to predict the medium-term future --- it has to be both plausible and surprising (who in 1960 would not have been surprised by the world of 2000?). This is a hard thing to do; the two requirements almost contradict one another. That said, Sterling's piece isn't a bad job of it. No, of course the world won't be exactly as he describes it --- but there are elements of it which could happen, more easily than we think. The bit about fatigue, in particular, is believable; just as increased knowledge about all of the truly horrible things that happen in the world led us, as a culture, to be tired of trying to fix them (there's a large set of literature on what social scientists describe as "compassion fatigue"), constantly chasing after the cool, new technology will lead us to "technology fatigue": the excitement will dwindle. More importantly, he's asking a very relevant question: in a world where the value of everything is defined by marketing, and everyone knows it, how is it possible for anything to have value or be intrinsically important at all? If everything is marketing, what matters? Unlike Sterling, I think that society as a whole will react by retreating into religion. But there will be some sectors that don't --- and while Sterling essentially points to despair as the solution that will emerge, it might be interesting to speculate about what, eventually, would replace such despair.
the plaintexts of even encrypted messages can be subpoenaed (sp?), so caution in what is said is still important.
Which is a good reason, if you really want your email to be private, to embed messages using inside of plaintext messages using some previously agreed mechanism for decryption (every third letter of every third word, or some such).
Time-consuming, yes --- and it's vulnerable to advanced cryptographic analysis, so this should only be done _inside_ of encrypted messages --- but it obscures the real content of messages from this type of discovery, as the people searching through the messages won't be trained cryptogrophers, and won't take the time to look for patterns of this nature.
What, so now if I'm a private company do I have to get permission from the FTC every time I want to sell or give away a piece of information I've collected?
From the article at least, it would appear the answer is _no_: the ruling was an interpretation of a federal law which only applies to credit reporting agencies. It would be extremely difficult to generalize this to other private companies, unless a new law were passed.
what a waste of taxpayer money. There's no other way to avoid Europa?
It's _not_ a waste of taxpayer money --- the ship will stop functioning soon anyway; it's outlived its expected lifetime and is starting to degenerate.
no one pays for network tv. when you copy a novel onto your webpage it's the same as pirating software, but rebroastcasting tv is like pirating freeware.
The television program is owned by whoever is considered it's author, and that entity has the exclusive right to authorize its broadcast.
The difference is that the author of the freeware has authorized its use as such; the author of the programs being rebroadcast by iCraveTV has, in most cases,not done so.
Re-read your copy of the Berne Convention. You don't know what you are talking about.
www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overview.html
Article 9:
"Authors of literary and artistic works protected by this convention shall have the exclusive right of authorizing the reproduction of these works, in any manner or form. It shall be a matter for legislation in the countroes if the Union to permit the reproduction of such works in certain special cases, provided that such reproduction does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author. Any sound or visual recording shall be considered as a reproduction for the purposes of this convention."
Looks to me like the author of the television show has exclusive right to authorize broadcast, except in special cases explicitly authorized by legislation.
As much as I might like to be able to watch television shows over the net, this case is a pretty clear example of copyright violation.
It would be illegal for me to post the full text of the latest Peter Hamilton novel on my web page. Excerpts of it would be legal (under the fair use doctrine), but the full thing would not be; I would expect to have lawyers for the publisher harassing me as soon as they noticed it.
It's just as illegal for iCraveTV to rebroadcast television programs. Two-minute long excerpts would probably be ok under fair use, but...
None of this means that television will never be viewable over the net --- but it will have to be something the producers of programming choose to do, or that the networks choose to do (and they're often distinctly different); it can't just randomly be done by someone who does not have any legal rights to the programming whatsoever.
[Note --- these copyright issues are governed by international treaty, not by national law; they are binding in Canada, the US, and any other country which has signed the Berne convention...]
Unfortunately, there is an area where ActiveX _is_ a gaping security hole: the registry.
In order for AX controls to work properly, they have to register themselves. Because Windows does not support _selective_ registry access (in which, for example, an AX control would only have direct access to the TYPELIB and CLASSID keys, and would have to be authenticated in order to have access to anything else), that control can then change anything else in the registry.
A better model would seperate out the parts of the registry used by AX controls and grant automagic write access only to them.
>> MS will probably use some flavor of WINE when porting office to Linux > Um... why?
Which would be (a) easier, and (b) allow faster time to market: porting their virtual win32 environment to run under Linux, or linking their existing executables into some flavor of WINE?
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever is good for the USER is what should get implmented
...]
...
Sure, in general. But there's always a trade-off; if implementing this means that the code is likely to be buggier, or the executable bigger, or performance slower, than you have to ask if it's really better for the user.
[It shouldn't do any of these things, as the code really ought to be talking to some sort of meta-widget that aggregates a real widget; this makes porting *much* easier, but
What I don't understand is why the people complaining about evil themes don't create a theme which *looks just like standard widgets* and then get people shipping themable applications to use that as their default
For crying out loud, quit worrying, people.
I worry about these lawsuits for a couple of reasons.
(1) Some day, I might do something which seems perfectly innocuous to me, but which offends an entrenched interest who decides to take me to court. The only way I can prevent that is by understanding who gets sued and why, and acting to voice my outrage when I think a suit is offensive.
(2) As an active member of the software development industry, I am interested in trying to find ways that we can increase the quality of the products we are developing, and reduce the stress involved in developing them. Things like UCITA are the wrong way to go, if that is your goal.
(3) As a citizen who believes, by and large, that the country I live in is one of the most 'progressive' and 'free' societies *in history*, I have an interest in keeping it that way --- and many of these lawsuits will have the opposite effect (as will the type of civil disobedience you seem to be advocating).
Sure, I can stick my head in the sand. But that buys me a moment's comfort at the cost of the battle.
Keep a spare airfare in your bank in case she needs help
That's a good idea. Along similar lines, if she can get access to an American Express card, she should absolutely do so --- they have the feature of having *no cash advance limit*, which means that if for some reason she has to buy an emergency plane ticket out of the middle of nowhere, she can do so.
[Sure, she has to pay it back that month --- but she's here, considering how to pay the fee, not there, considering how to get out.]
San Francisco (which is *not* SiliValley)
Close enough. Totally different cultures, sure, but within 80 miles of each other in a city which is continuous between them.
Hell, I live in *Santa Cruz*, which is seperated from both by a mountain, and when travelling in foreign countries I normally say i'm from San Francisco.
Geeks are clumped together in two superdense regions: Silicon Valley, CA, and Dallas (Richardson), TX.
Huh?
How about:
* Seattle, Washington
* Austin, Texas
* Maryland and northern Virginia
* Boston, Massachusetts
The geek concentration has always been over-rated and is getting more so every day.
Absent such identification, pre-existing economic entities have predominant roles -- think corporations and unions
Ah, but that misses the point entirely: there was a time in history when unions didn't exist, and someone had to fight to create them. I think the originator of this thread is essentially calling for the organization of something which would have the same influence, in favor of tech industry workers, that the unions did in their heyday.
The problem with this is that it's unlikely to happen --- we (read: tech industry workers) won't have the drive to be politically motivated on that kind of scale unless something makes us angry, and we're sadly deficient in anger right now.
That's one of the funniest political statement's i've seen in a long time:
tell your governments to start standing up to the US and stop being our lapdogs! After all, if we lose the battle to stop and reverse the hemorrage of civil liberties here, it would be nice to have somewhere to escape to
A citizen of a theoretically democratic country exhorting citizens of other countries to stop his country, so he has a place to escape to when things get bad ---- something is very, very wrong with the picture.
But there is still the issue of wrongly blocked sites.
The thing which I find most bewildering about censorware software is how many of the popular ones --- and both ones which have generated articles on slashdot recently --- make it impossible to find out what is being blocked.
One company claims that the list is a "trade secret", and Mattel doesn't publishe theirs --- and somehow that makes the censorware software seem much, much, much more sinister than it is intended to be.
There was a (new, late '80s) Twilight Zone story
...
Based on a short story by Isaac Asimov, in fact
it follows by definition that I will be interested in lame Science Fiction. This is just one example of Slashdot's ongoing pandering to negative nerd stereotypes. Another example is the assumption that we are all fans of open source, and share the same sense ofcommunity spirit. I suppose Slashdot's owners assume we are fat, friendless heavy metal fans who have never been laid in our lives.
The assumption that all Slashdot readers are fans of open source is halfway reasonable --- this is a site that grew up around Linux, an open source operating system, after all. The community spirit bit is also important as a prequisite to the function of the site: threaded discussions do not work well without community spirirt, as many USENET group denizens discovered to their horror in the mid-90s.
As for science fiction: you have a point that often slashdot has more fluff content than hard technical news, and bits about science fiction are heavily involved in that; but it is also true that, for the majority of people in this industry, science fiction forms an important part of the culture --- and Dune, in particular, is part of the limited canon of books (along with The Lord of the Rings, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Ender's Game, among others) that it can be reasonably assumed that anyone who has read any science fiction at all has read.
*shrug* You can't expect a news service for "nerds" to not talk about such things.
The truly absurd thing is that Symantec claims that the list of sites the software blocks is a trade secret. Thus, potential customers are not allowed to find out what the software blocks!
"Install our software! It blocks bad sites!"
"Which sites in particular does it block?"
"Bad ones!"
"Which bad sites?"
"We can't tell you which ones, because then someone else might come along and block the same sites."
*wince*
Is 2000 that similar to 1960?
Microwave ovens existed, barely. Cable TV? VCRS/CDs? Let alone the internet and computers?
That's just in terms of products that weren't available then. Then add things like: you can give people artificial hearts? What is this AIDS thing, anyway? What do you mean gasoline is $1.80 a gallon?
The trick is --- it doesn't _feel_ that different, to anyone who lived through it. But in reality, we're a completely different society; and, in the same way, the world of 2040 won't feel that different from today, for those of us who live through it --- but, taken as snapshots, and then compared, they would be completely different.
Bitch and witch can be used interchangeably
....
Ah, but it's not like there are many options:
twitch,pitch,snitch,ditch,hitch are the only ones
which come to mind
find it odd that the newspaper felt it could not publish the word that rhymed with "tart"?
*puzzled look* When, exactly, did this word become obscene?
Hmmm... is religion something that people "retreat" into?
I can see how that could easily be read as a slam on religion --- which isn't what I intended. But i've seen a lot of people who are vaguely associated with some religion discover that, by becoming more religious, they have an anchor they found missing in the world as a whole; so I think, for some segments of society, religion will be the answer to the fatigue.
Not for everyone --- and people that are anti-religious would probably get pushed the other way, as you described --- but, for many. *shrug*
In the afterword to Earth, David Brin talks at length about how difficult it is to predict the medium-term future --- it has to be both plausible and surprising (who in 1960 would not have been surprised by the world of 2000?). This is a hard thing to do; the two requirements almost contradict one another. That said, Sterling's piece isn't a bad job of it. No, of course the world won't be exactly as he describes it --- but there are elements of it which could happen, more easily than we think. The bit about fatigue, in particular, is believable; just as increased knowledge about all of the truly horrible things that happen in the world led us, as a culture, to be tired of trying to fix them (there's a large set of literature on what social scientists describe as "compassion fatigue"), constantly chasing after the cool, new technology will lead us to "technology fatigue": the excitement will dwindle. More importantly, he's asking a very relevant question: in a world where the value of everything is defined by marketing, and everyone knows it, how is it possible for anything to have value or be intrinsically important at all? If everything is marketing, what matters? Unlike Sterling, I think that society as a whole will react by retreating into religion. But there will be some sectors that don't --- and while Sterling essentially points to despair as the solution that will emerge, it might be interesting to speculate about what, eventually, would replace such despair.
the plaintexts of even encrypted messages can be subpoenaed (sp?), so caution in what is said is still important.
Which is a good reason, if you really want your email to be private, to embed messages using inside of plaintext messages using some previously agreed mechanism for decryption (every third letter of every third word, or some such).
Time-consuming, yes --- and it's vulnerable to advanced cryptographic analysis, so this should only be done _inside_ of encrypted messages --- but it obscures the real content of messages from this type of discovery, as the people searching through the messages won't be trained cryptogrophers, and won't take the time to look for patterns of this nature.
What, so now if I'm a private company do I have to get permission from the FTC every time I want to sell or give away a piece of information I've collected?
From the article at least, it would appear the answer is _no_: the ruling was an interpretation of a federal law which only applies to credit reporting agencies. It would be extremely difficult to generalize this to other private companies, unless a new law were passed.
what a waste of taxpayer money. There's no other way to avoid Europa?
It's _not_ a waste of taxpayer money --- the ship will stop functioning soon anyway; it's outlived its expected lifetime and is starting to degenerate.
If ICraveTV's owner hadn't made the mistake of registering his .com while living in the U.S. they'd have probably been laughed out of court in Canada
Only if Canada does not adhere to international treaties which it has signed. See www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/9.html.
no one pays for network tv. when you copy a novel onto your webpage it's the same as pirating software, but rebroastcasting tv is like pirating freeware.
The television program is owned by whoever is considered it's author, and that entity has the exclusive right to authorize its broadcast.
The difference is that the author of the freeware has authorized its use as such; the author of the programs being rebroadcast by iCraveTV has, in most cases,not done so.
Re-read your copy of the Berne Convention. You don't know what you are talking about.
l
www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overview.htm
Article 9:
"Authors of literary and artistic works protected by this convention shall have the exclusive right of authorizing the reproduction of these works, in any manner or form. It shall be a matter for legislation in the countroes if the Union to permit the reproduction of such works in certain special cases, provided that such reproduction does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author. Any sound or visual recording shall be considered as a reproduction for the purposes of this convention."
Looks to me like the author of the television show has exclusive right to authorize broadcast, except in special cases explicitly authorized by legislation.
As much as I might like to be able to watch television shows over the net, this case is a pretty clear example of copyright violation.
...
...]
It would be illegal for me to post the full text of the latest Peter Hamilton novel on my web page. Excerpts of it would be legal (under the fair use doctrine), but the full thing would not be; I would expect to have lawyers for the publisher harassing me as soon as they noticed it.
It's just as illegal for iCraveTV to rebroadcast television programs. Two-minute long excerpts would probably be ok under fair use, but
None of this means that television will never be viewable over the net --- but it will have to be something the producers of programming choose to do, or that the networks choose to do (and they're often distinctly different); it can't just randomly be done by someone who does not have any legal rights to the programming whatsoever.
[Note --- these copyright issues are governed by international treaty, not by national law; they are binding in Canada, the US, and any other country which has signed the Berne convention
Unfortunately, there is an area where ActiveX _is_ a gaping security hole: the registry.
In order for AX controls to work properly, they have to register themselves. Because Windows does not support _selective_ registry access (in which, for example, an AX control would only have direct access to the TYPELIB and CLASSID keys, and would have to be authenticated in order to have access to anything else), that control can then change anything else in the registry.
A better model would seperate out the parts of the registry used by AX controls and grant automagic write access only to them.
--Robert West
--Delphi ActiveX R&D
>> MS will probably use some flavor of WINE when porting office to Linux ... why?
> Um
Which would be (a) easier, and (b) allow faster time to market: porting their virtual win32 environment to run under Linux, or linking their existing executables into some flavor of WINE?